That made me turn white. I got my manuscript and I went out on the street, and the houses reeled about me. “So,” I said, “and that settles it!” As I walked along I stared into the future. It seemed very clear all of a sudden. I thought it all out. “No one will publish The Captive,” I said, “and no one would heed it if it were published. Therefore I have but one question to face, Have I the strength to go on, living as I have lived, distracted and tormented as I have been--and still piling up new emotions in my soul, daring new efforts, reaching new heights, producing new books? I can have no idea that my second work will be any more available than my first; on the contrary, I know that it would be just what The Captive is, only more so. Therefore, perhaps it will be ten years--perhaps it will be twenty years--before men begin to pay any heed to what I have written! And so there is the question, Have I the strength to go on in that way--have I the strength to face that future?” Then I grew faint and had to lean against a railing. _I knew that I could not do that!_ * * * * * It is no question of what I will do! It is a question of what I _can_ do! I am weakened and sick with the yearning that I have in me already. My last “business” experience drove me mad. And I am to go on, I am to rouse new hunger, new passion, new agony in my soul! Why, the work that I have dreamed of next is so hard and so far-away that I hardly dared even whisper it! It would take years and years of toiling! And I am to do it here in this seething city--to do it while I sell wholesale-paper--to do it while I am sick for lack of food! I can not do it! I _can_ not! I went home, and I was crazy; so it was that I did my second desperate thing. I sat down and wrote a letter to Mr. ----. I wrote a letter--I can not see how it could fail to stir the soul of any man. I told him how I had toiled--I told him how for four long months I had waited in agony--I told him what the publishers had said to me. I begged him--I implored him--for the sake of the unuttered message that cried out day and night in my soul--not to throw the letter aside--to read it--to give me a chance to talk to him. I said: “I will live in a hut, I will cook my own food, I will wear the clothes of a day laborer! If I can only be free--if I can only be free to be an artist! I could do it, all of it, for two hundred dollars a year; and I could win the battle, I know, if I had but three years. I am desperate as I write to you--I look ahead and I can see only ruin; and not ruin for myself--I do not mind that--but ruin for my art! I can tell you what that means to me in but one way--I ask you to read my book. I have put all my soul into that book--I will stake my all upon it. If you will only read it, you will see what I mean--you will see why I have written you this letter. You will see that it is not a beggar's letter, but a high challenge from an artist's soul.”