"I had hoped," she said, "to get my novel on the market before this, but I have not yet found a publisher to suit me." She winced inwardly at this way of expressing the fact that every publisher, high and low, far and near, had declined her MS. out of hand; but she could not say the awful truth in its simpliest terms, while speaking to one so prosperous as Dufour. She felt that she must at all hazards preserve a reasonable show of literary independence. Crane came to her aid. "One publisher is just as good as another," he said almost savagely. "They are all thieves. They report every book a failure, save those they own outright, and yet they all get rich. I shall publish for myself my next volume." Dufour smiled grimly and turned away. It was rather monotonous, this iteration and reiteration of so grave a charge against the moral character of publishers, and this threat of Crane's to become his own publisher was a bit of unconscious and therefore irresistible humor. "It's too pathetic to be laughed at," Dufour thought, as he strolled along to where Miss Moyne sat under a tree, "but that Kentuckian actually thinks himself a poet!" With all his good nature and kind heartedness, Dufour could be prejudiced, and he drew the line at what he called the "prevailing tendency toward boastful prevarication among Kentucky gentlemen." As he walked away he heard Crane saying: "George Dunkirk & Co. have stolen at least twenty thousand dollars in royalties from me during the past three years." It was the voice of Ferris that made interrogative response: "Is Dunkirk your publisher?" "Yes, or rather my robber." "Glad of it, misery loves company."