"For Heaven's sake, talk!" he exclaimed, as he flung himself into the rickety chair that used to be his own. "Say anything you like, but talk. I've just had an hour and a half of my mother-in-law neat! Take the taste out of my mouth. Turk, I wish I were dead! What the devil is to be the end of it? The Walfords say 'a clerk-ship'! Oh, my God, you should hear the Walfords! I've 'a little aptitude,' but I mustn't be conceited. I mustn't seriously call myself a novelist. I've frivolled away a year on _The Eye of the Beholder_, and Cousins squared the reviewers for me on _The Spectator_ and _The Saturday_ and the rest! Look here, I must get something to do. Don't you know of anything, can't you I introduce me to an editor, isn't there anything stirring at all? _I_'m buried; I live in a red-brick tomb in Streatham; I hear nothing, and see nobody, except my blasted parents-in-law. But you're in the thick of it; you sniff the mud of Fleet Street every day; you're the salaried sub of a paper that's going to put a cover on itself and 'throw it in' at the penny; you----" "Yes," said Turquand, "I 'Ave flung my thousands gily ter the benefit of tride, And gin'rally (they tells me) done the grand.' It looks like it, doesn't it?" "I know all about that! But surely you can tell me of a chance? I don't say an opening, but a chance of an opening. Man, the outlook's awful. I shall be stony directly. You must!" "Fendall and Green haven't written, eh?" "No; their regrets haven't come yet. How about short stories?" "You didn't find 'em particularly lucrative, did you?" "A guinea each; one in six months. No; but I want to be invited to contribute: 'Can you let us have anything this month, Mr. Kent?'" "My dear chap! should I have stuck to _The Outpost_ all these years if I had such advice to give away? I did"--he coughed, and spat out an invisible shred of tobacco--"I did stick to it." "You weren't going to say that! You were going to say, 'I did advise you once, but you _would marry_!' Well, I don't complain that I married. The only fault I have to find with my wife is that she's the Walford's daughter. She's not literary, but she's a very good girl. Don't blink facts, Turk; my money would have lasted longer if I hadn't married, but I shouldn't have got my novel taken on that account. The point of this situation is that, after being lauded to the skies by every paper of importance in England, I can't place the book I write next at any price at all, nor find a way to earn bread and cheese by my pen! If a musician had got such criticisms on a composition, he'd be a made man. If an artist had had them on a picture, the ball would be at his feet. If an actor had got them on a performance, he'd be offered engagements at a hundred a week. It's only in literature that such an anomalous and damnable condition of affairs as mine is possible. You can't deny it." "I don't," said Turquand. CHAPTER XIII