"Oh, yes, it would," she answered easily. "All it needs is a change or two at the beginning, and perhaps a line here and there to make it more specifically local, or rather, American, in application." "But it's not what newspapers print or care to print." "It's a beautiful thing," she cried. "They'd jump at it." And then she added, as an after-thought, "If it had been written by any one with a name." "That's just it," he explained. "The offer hasn't been made to me, you see." "Yes, I know," she began. "And that's why I hesitated about suggesting the thing." He seemed to be weighing the matter, and she waited for him to speak. "Of course it's awfully good of you to extend the offer to me at the last moment, and all that sort of thing. But I know well enough this paper would never think of offering _me_ any such sum for the lines." She looked at him steadily. "They would if it appeared over my name." "But I couldn't ask you to do that--and for a mere matter of money," he cried. "I would gladly, for you." "But it would scarcely be fair, either to you or to me." She almost hated him, she felt, when he stood so proudly behind that old-time integrity of character of his. Even as she argued, though, she secretly hoped against hope that he would hold out, that he would defeat her where she stood. Then remembering again more than one scene of inward humiliation over what he seemed to have accepted as her womanly proneness to tangle the devious skeins of ethics and expediency, a touch of the tyrant came to her once more. "I _want_ you to have this money," she pleaded. "It's only right that you should. You need it--_I_ have made you need it." He turned to her suddenly as he paced up and down the room. "Isn't there any possible way of obviating the--the deception?" he asked. The mere utterance of that question told her that the problem had been solved. Perhaps the quiet and businesslike manner in which it had been presented to him had robbed it of its more abstract significance, had enabled it to be smuggled into him in the sheep's clothing of a commercial commonplace. Perhaps he was more embarrassed--in a financial way--than she had dreamed, and now that he had sunned himself on the warm sands of respectability, dreaded another plunge into the chilly depths of a second poverty. "I don't see any way out of it," she answered. "I suppose, unless you have an inkling of newspaper ways, such things have a tendency to shock you?" "I know a _little_ of their ways that are dark," he interpolated, thinking at the moment of the United News Bureau. "But this is only one of the thousand and one tricks of a very tricky trade. And it really amounts to about the same thing as the signed article young reporters write for an illiterate prize-fighter or a rather stupid prima donna. At any rate, is it any worse?" "But would there be any means of finally correcting the--the error of authorship?" he asked. "Is it the loss of the poem?" she began.