Howard stammered thanks and went away. This piece of news, dropped apparently so carelessly by Mr. King, meant a revolution in fortune for him. It was the transition from close calculation on twenty-five dollars a week to wealth beyond his most fanciful dreams of six months ago. Not having the money-getting instinct and being one of those who compare their work with the best instead of with the inferior, Howard never felt that he was “entitled to a living.” He had a lively sense of gratitude for the money return for his services which prudence presently taught him to conceal. “Space” meant to him eighty dollars a week at least--circumstances of ease. So vast a sum did it seem that he began to consider the problem of investment. “I have been not badly off on twenty-five dollars a week,” he thought. “With, well, say forty dollars a week I shall be able to satisfy all my wants. I can save at least forty a week and that will mean an independence with a small income by the time I am thirty-four.” But--a year after he was put “on space” he was still just about even with his debts. He seemed to himself to be living no better and it was only by careful counting-up that he could see how that dream of independence had eluded him. A more extensive wardrobe, a little better food, a more comfortable suite of rooms, an occasional dinner to some friends, loans to broken-down reporters, and the mysteriously vanished two thousand dollars was accounted for. Howard tried to retrench, devised small ingenious schemes for saving money, lectured himself severely and frequently for thus trifling away his chance to be a free man. But all in vain. He remained poor; and, whenever he gave the matter thought, which was not often, gloomy forebodings as to the future oppressed him. “I shall find myself old,” he thought, “with nothing accomplished, with nothing laid by. I shall be an old drudge.” He understood the pessimistic tone of his profession. All about him were men like himself--leading this gambler’s life of feverish excitement and evanescent achievement, earning comfortable incomes and saving nothing, looking forward to the inevitable time of failing freshness and shattered nerves and declining income. He spasmodically tried to write stories for the magazines, contrived plots for novels and plays, wrote first chapters, first scenes of first acts. But the exactions of newspaper life, the impossibility of continuous effort at any one piece of work and his natural inertia--he was inert but neither idle nor lazy--combined to make futile his efforts to emancipate himself from hand-to-mouth journalism.