He spoke lightly, but there was an undertone of bitterness in his words, a hint of the claws under the velvet of unconcern. For the first time Miss Short forgot the broad shoulders, and noticed the unlooked-for sternness about the young man's mouth, the hitherto uncaught thin chiseling of the ascetic nose and the puzzling dreaminess of the calm eyes. He was a man who had not found himself. "But I could never see the use of going about being a student of evil," she said gently enough. "For I assure you you'll never do our East Side any good--though, perhaps, in another way, it _may_ do you a lot of good. Tell me, though, what started you at it?" "Repellier, more than any one else, I think. He told me to get Americanized, to come out of the mud-pond and get into the rapids. He suspected, you know, that all I did was loaf about Oxford and write radical verse." "Well, perhaps it's best you did give up your poetry, and all that. We haven't much time for mooning over here, and if you'd come among us with the writing habit you'd soon have seen what a pitiful, pot-boiling lot we are, and you'd have got soured, and gone on one of the dailies, or dropped into translating, or drifted into a syndicate, and ended up by being still another young Israelite looking for an impossible promised land of American literature!" Hartley winced a little and remained silent. "It wouldn't have taken you long to find out what a lot of fakirs we are. Don't look shocked--fakirs is the only word; I'm one myself." "But a fakir never confesses, does he?" "Fifteen years ago I was earnest, ambitious, penniless, and proud-spirited. I imagined I was going to write the great American novel. Now I'm a silly, egotistical, spoiled old woman, writing advertisements for a Brooklyn soap-maker, publishing Sunday-school stories under seven different names, grinding out short stories and verses that I despise, and concocting a novel now and then that I abominate! That is the crown of thorns the city puts on your head. If I'd only stayed out in my little Wisconsin village, and gone hungry, and been unhappy, and waited, some day I might have written my great book!" "Then why not go back, and wait, and be unhappy, and hungry, even, and write it?"