New York, which she had feared, and which had always seemed to her so great and so far. New York that now stood for all the hope in her life. After the professor had gone she began turning his advice over in her mind. She could go no further here. She might there. But the struggle to keep up the pace in New York while she was doing it, would probably throttle all the ambition and freshness she had as capital to begin with. She thought of people she loved who had gone. She could not turn out ill after all their care. She might accomplish something in spite of the difficulties. Lots of people had. Her impulse was to dare until, under the heat of its spell, she wrote a line to Glenn Andrews. “What do you think of New York for me?” CHAPTER IV. “WHAT do I think of New York for you?” Glenn Andrews replied, “frankly I don’t know. You forget that the one thing necessary to answer your question is the one thing I don’t possess. That is to say, I don’t know you as time has made you. What I would have said years ago to the slip of a girl, I cannot say to the growing woman. You and your art are the deciding quantities. Have you bodily strength, or only nerve fibre? Have you real genius, or only mediocrity? Genius, which lives by self-understanding, can forgive this blunt questioning. New York takes strength. It is a great monster which grips you by the throat and shakes you as a dog does a squirrel. The process shakes the life out of its body and leaves it broken and dead, or else it twists its neck, bites strong and deep, and is allowed to go. You must draw blood to make the monster of city life quit--the rich, warm blood of enthusiasm and applause. And I doubt whether your teeth are strong enough. “Success means hard work--long, bitter days and nights of it--drab days of monotony, black nights of disappointment. It means toil and tears. This is a maelstrom, and only the biggest branches float on the surface. The little twigs are sucked down. And it is a place of giant timber. The oak from the country hillside is only a scrub here. You must remember this. The bigness of it all makes for heartlessness. When one meets a beggar on every corner, one soon ceases to feel sorry; and where failures are so common, there is seldom a helping hand or even a sigh of sympathy. Only the warmest fire can go on burning brightly with the ice falling so thick around it. “So much for you yourself, and your own view of yourself. As to your ability, I mean. Your circumstances I do not know. New York takes money. In comparison with your own home, it takes a great deal. To succeed in it requires time--years; and unless you can afford to stay it through, you would better save yourself the discouragement of failure, for there is no bitterer failure than that which we feel to be purely circumstantial.