the
storm wind.

Horace gazed up at the clouds overhead, which looked like the rapids
of some terrible, heavenly river overlapping each other in shell-like
shapes and moving with intense fury. He thought of Rose, and first
hoped that she was in the house, and then reflected that he might as
well give up all hope of ever marrying her. The returned manuscript
in his pocket seemed to weigh down his very soul. He recalled various
stories which he had read in the current magazines of late, and it
seemed to him that his compared very favorably with them. He tried to
think of the matter judicially, as if the rejected story were not his
own, and felt justified in thinking well of it. He had a sickening
sense of being pitted against something which he could not gainsay,
which his own convictions as to the privilege of persons in authority
to have their own opinions forbade him to question.

"The editors had a perfect right to return my story, even if it is
every whit as worthy of publication, even worthier, than anything
which has appeared in their magazine for a twelvemonth," he told
himself.

He realized that he was not dependent upon the public concerning the
merit of his work--he could not be until the work appeared in
print--but he was combating the opinions (or appealing to them) of a
few men whose critical abilities might be biassed by a thousand
personal matters with which he could not interfere. He felt that
there was a broad, general injustice in the situation, but absolute
right as to facts. These were men to whom was given the power to
accept or refuse. No one could question their right to use that
power. Horace said to himself that he was probably a fool to
entertain for a moment any hope of success under such conditions.

"Good Lord! It might depend upon whether the readers had
indigestion," he thought; and at the same time he accepted the
situation with a philosophic pride of surrender.

"It's about one chance in a good many thousand," he told himself. "If
I don't get the chance some other fellow does, and there's no mortal
way but to make the best of it, unless I act like a fool myself."
Horace was exceedingly alive to the lack of dignity of one who kicked
against the pricks. He said to himself that if he could not marry
Rose, if he could not ask her why, he must accept his fate, not
attack it to his own undoing, nor even deplore it to his ignominy.

In all this he was, rather curiously, leaving the girl