my capacity. I could name half a dozen
men who could do it much better than I could. They know how to do it,
they have that kind of touch. I have been surprised at the literary
ability engaged by the great corporations."

Mr. Ault made a gesture of impatience. "I wouldn't give a damn for that
sort of thing. It is money thrown away. If I should get one of the
popular writers you refer to, the public would know he was hired. If you
lay your story out there, nobody will suspect anything of the sort. It
will be a clean literary novel. Not travel, you understand, but a story,
and the more love in it the better. It will be a novelty. You can run
your car sixty miles an hour in exciting passages, everything will work
into it. When people travel on the road the pictures will show them the
scenes of the story. It is a big thing," said Mr. Ault in conclusion.

"I see it is," said Philip, rising at the hint that his time had expired.
"I am very much obliged to you, Mr. Ault, for your confidence in me. But
it is a new idea. I will have to think it over."

"Well, think it over. There is money in it. You would not start till
about midsummer. Good-day."

A private car! Travel like a prince! Certainly literature was looking
up in the commercial world. Philip walked back to his publishers with a
certain elasticity of step, a new sense of power. Yes, the power of the
pen. And why not? No doubt it would bring him money and spread his name
very widely. There was nothing that a friendly corporation could not do
for a favorite. He would then really be a part of the great, active,
enterprising world. Was there anything illegitimate in taking advantage
of such an opportunity? Surely, he should remain his own master, and
write nothing except what his own conscience approved. But would he not
feel, even if no one else knew it, that he was the poet-laureate of a
corporation?

And suddenly, as he thought how the clear vision of Evelyn would plunge
to the bottom of such a temptation, he felt humiliated that such a
proposition should have been made to him. Was there nothing, nobody,
that commercialism did not think for sale and to be trafficked in?

Nevertheless, he wrote to Alice about it, describing the proposal as it
was made to him, without making any comment on it.

Alice replied speedily. "Isn't it funny," she wrote, "and isn't it
preposterous? I wonder what such people think? And that horrid young
pirate, Ault, a patron of literature!