and deepened into gold, and the eyes that before had seemed cold to him grew warm and lustrous. He had been a very lonely young man. In his head fermented a dozen great things still unaccomplished; chance had broken no clean channel through the sour stagnation of those fermenting cross-purposes. And now the artist in him aspired desperately for freedom. Again he wondered if, after all, his older, uncompromising ideality, his older rigid sense of right and wrong, was not the result of mingled priggishness and petulance. Even though he had to stoop a little for this first start, after all, it was a start. And once under way surely some new and unforeseen avenue of escape would offer itself. And if for a time he felt a half-caged conscience beating against its bars, he muffled that last tremulous flutter in his cry for some release from the sordid drudgery and the stultifying gloom that was holding him down. Sitting up late into the night, Hartley rewrote his article on Cordelia Vaughan. The insinuation of the personal equation into his work was easier than it had looked. Time was, he knew, when he had rejoiced in attacking these seven-day wonders of the world of letters, the noisy idols with their posings and world-old impositions. He himself for months had been doing miserable hack work in the services of an unscrupulous syndicate, for a few paltry dollars a week, that he might hold unpolluted from all that was sordid and commercial that inner and more sacred fount. He had thrown his coat in the mire that his goddess might still walk with white feet. He had never confounded his serious work with the work of the moment. He had not asked for much; he could live on little, very little indeed. He was willing to work humbly, so long as he might only see some ultimate opportunity to labor on unharrassed by the worries and impecuniosities that now hung over him, and all but stifled him. With the Muse there must be no divided love. He had long since learned that while the work of the creative mind is joyous enough, it is likewise exhausting. All he cried out for was opportunity. It was the artist aspiring for his freedom. It was the creator casting about for his chance to create. There were men in the city, Hartley knew, who were making fortunes by their pen. But they were men who, only too often, had allowed the temporary interest to intervene, men who had sought the immediate reward of the dollar, men who put their finger, adroitly enough, on the pulse of the world and gave it what it asked for, regardless of conscience and consequence. Was he, too, to become one of these? Was this fragile and pale-faced priestess of Mnemosyne, whose friendship had promised so much for him, insidiously to forge the first link in that golden chain which was to bind him down? Yet he had done nothing that was dishonorable. After all, even the artist must have his modern ideas of the business side of life. It was the law of the land.