Then without waiting for reply, she went away and left him to his thoughts. IX HIS PURE HEART'S TRUTH Two Gentlemen of Verona, iv. 2. "Who is Mr. Rangely?" Ashe inquired one morning at breakfast. Mrs. Herman looked at her husband as if she expected him to reply, although the question had been addressed to her. "Fred Rangely," Grant Herman answered, "is a writer. He writes for the magazines and is a newspaper man. He's written one or two novels, and the first one was pretty successful. He's written plays too." Helen smiled. "Grant is too good-natured to tell you what you really want to know," she commented. "Mr. Rangely was once in some sort a friend of his, in the old days when there was still something like an artistic brotherhood in Boston, and he can't bear to say things that are not to his credit. Now I should have answered your question by saying that Fred Rangely is a warning." "A what?" Ashe asked, while Herman sighed. "A warning. A dozen years ago he was one of the most promising men about. He had made a good beginning, he was clever and popular, and both as a novelist and as a playwright we hoped for great things from him." "And now?" "Now he is a failure." Herman looked up almost reprovingly. "I don't think he would recognize that," he observed. "No, he wouldn't; and that's the worst of it. Ten years ago if anybody had said of Fred Rangely: 'Here's a fellow that has started out to do good work, but has found that there's more money in sensationalism; who despises the popular taste and caters to it; who writes things he doesn't believe for the newspapers and spends the money in running after society,' he would have pronounced such a fellow a cad. Now he would say: 'Well, a man must live, you know; and the public will only pay for what it wants.' It's lamentable." "You put it rather worse than it is," her husband responded. "We are all in the habit of judging men as if their degradation was deliberate, which as a matter of fact I suppose it never is. Rangely hasn't coolly accepted the choice between honesty and Philistinism. It's all come gradually." "Like learning to pick pockets," she interpolated. "Besides," Herman continued, "we over-estimated in the beginning both his character and his talent. He found he couldn't do what was expected of him, and he was weak enough to do then what was most comfortable instead of what seemed to him highest. It is what nine men out of ten do." "Of course," Helen assented, "but after all it has come about by his giving in on one thing after another. There was always a good deal that is attractive about him, but he never showed much moral stamina. He could never have married as he did if he had possessed fine instincts." "And his wife?" Ashe inquired. "Oh, he married a New York girl, who"--