"How nice!" said the woman at the cups. "That's so good I'm going to use it," she added gratefully. "Do you know you've given me quite a number of ideas for my book already?" He wondered just what those ideas could have been, and failed utterly to recall anything worthy of remembrance in their talk. "That idea about the road to liberty being beautiful, especially," she explained. "It's splendid." "But I'm afraid it's very, very old," said Hartley. She took the statement as mere self-derogation. "I know you're going to be a novelist some day," she cried inconsequentially. "Or a poet, at least." Hartley winced at the after-thought, and remembered his three little thin green volumes so carefully hidden away this many a month. "But _do_ be good and tell me more about yourself, and your work, and what you intend to do. We've been talking about me and my book, and the things I'm to do--and leave undone--and all the time I feel sure you're a man with a _magnum opus_--isn't that what you call it?--somewhere up your sleeve." She had an odd little bird-like way of holding her head on one side--an attitude that not only suggested a sort of timorous alertness, but endowed her at the same time with a certain flattering, half-ingratiating, dreamy-eyed attentiveness. When Hartley thought it over in cold blood he could never adequately explain to himself just why it was he had entered into that long and exhaustive revelation of his aims and ambitions, of his great works undone, of his huge books unwritten, of his visionary tasks as yet unbegun. Perhaps it was because the woman beside him listened with such quiet yet unctuous attention. Perhaps it was the suggestion of literary atmosphere which hung over that secluded little many-tinted study, making it stand as a temple of letters and a place not unfit for the confession of those most intimate and sacred dreams of the heart and brain which heretofore he had so carefully guarded in his own reticent bosom. However that may be, over the little Dresden tea-cups he unbosomed himself unreservedly to his new-found friend. He described to her how and why he had come to New York, of his desperate struggle to get his first position on a daily paper, of his still more desperate struggle to keep that position, of his precarious existence as a "free-lance," of his discoveries in the lore of living on two dollars a week, and of his final grounding on the shoals of the United News Bureau, where he now wrote on probation under thirteen different names and posed as a special correspondent in four different parts of the world on four different days of the week. He even grew so bold as to tell her of his still unfinished novel, giving a brief but, he thought, impressive outline of its odd plot and its even odder characters. He confessed, too, that he had always believed his best work had been done in verse.