"Yes, I think I have. It's all very fine out there, but it doesn't pay for the wear and tear on the hawsers. And then there's one's bread and butter; and in New York they can give you so many nice jams to go with it." "I knew it, I knew it! I never saw a boy come to this city yet who didn't have the rose-tint taken out of his dreams about the same time the rose-tint was taken out of his cheeks. I _said_ your accent wouldn't be as broad when you'd finished with us--nor your views, either." "No man can live by verse alone." "It's not that; it's what the verse and all that stands for. You know what The Silver Poppy says, 'A song in the heart is worth two in the book.'" She looked up at him with almost a kindly light on her rough, mannish face as she said good-by. "My poet, don't, don't let them break you on the golden wheel of their happiness!" Hartley did not enjoy his cup of Golden Tip that afternoon with Cordelia and two voluminously over-dressed young ladies whom she spoke of as "the Slater girls." Their chatter irritated him, and for once there seemed something sickly, unnatural, exotic, about the overheated air of an overfurnished hotel which existed, as he remembered a compatriot of his had exclaimed, "to provide exclusiveness for the masses." He knew that it, and all it held, stood for those very conditions of life against which he had once rebelled so vigorously. With its glitter and gliding, did it, he asked himself bitterly--after all, did it represent the fulness of life? "Why are you so quiet to-day?" Cordelia asked him, reprovingly, under her breath. He had noticed of late a certain outward hardening about her at times--she seemed to him like a judge steeling herself for some impending sentence that must be passed. "It's the ghost of a dead radical rising up against gold-leaf and cut glass," he laughed. "Oh, yes, you used to be an anarchist, or something like that, didn't you?" she said wearily. "Not _quite_ that." "I wanted you to be nice to these two girls. I thought I told you they were my publisher's daughters?" She noticed his half-sinister smile. "Some day," she said almost angrily, "you'll learn that nothing succeeds like success, my moody young Hamlet." And for the rest of the afternoon she avoided him. He was not sorry when a chance came for his escape. The very stale, dull flatness of the trite and contemptible spiritual drama in which he was playing an involuntary leading part depressed and sickened him of it all. It brought with it not even the consolation of largeness--it was all flaccid, neutral, outwardly insignificant. But he felt that unseen hands were building a wall between him and his freedom, even while, at the core of things, some miserably minute germ seemed tainting his life. And if he could not still have health and liberty, he would at least have elbow-room. The startled question of Miss Short still rang in his ears: "My poet, my poet, what have they been doing to you?"