“My dear young friend,” he frankly asked, “is there anything between us but our disparity of years? That existed from the first moment of our acquaintance. I have consoled myself at times with the notion of our continuing together in an exemplary friendship, you growing older and wiser, and I younger and less wise, if possible, like two Swedenborgian spirits in the final state. But evidently something has happened to tinge our amity with a grudge in your mind. Do you object to saying just what property in me has imparted this unpleasant discoloration to it?” Ray was ashamed to say, or rather unable. He answered that nothing was the matter, and that he did not know what Kane meant. He was obliged to prove this by a show of cordiality, which he began perhaps to feel when he reasoned away his first resentment. Kane had acted quite within his rights, and if there was to be any such thing as honest criticism, the free censure of a friend must be suffered and even desired. He said this to himself quite heroically; he tried hard to be ruled by a truth so obvious. In other things his adversity demoralized him, for a time. He ceased to live in the future, as youth does and should do; he lived carelessly and wastefully in the present. With nothing in prospect, it was no longer important how his time or money went; he did not try to save either. He never finished his poem, and he did not attempt anything else. In the midst of his listlessness and disoccupation there came a letter from Hanks Brothers asking if he could not give a little more social gossip in his correspondence for the _Echo_; they reminded him that there was nothing people liked so much as personalities. Ray scornfully asked himself, How should he, who knew only the outsides of houses, supply social gossip, even if he had been willing? He made a sarcastic reply to Hanks Brothers, intimating his readiness to relinquish the correspondence if it were not to their taste; and they took him at his word, and wrote that they would hereafter make use of a syndicate letter. It had needed this blow to rouse him from his reckless despair. If he were defeated now, it would be in the face of all the friends who had believed in him and expected success of him. His motive was not high; it was purely egoistic at the best; but he did not know this; he had a sense of virtue in sending his book off to a Boston publisher without undoing the inner wrappings in which the last New York publisher had returned it. Then he went round to ask Mr. Brandreth if he knew of any literary or clerical or manual work he could get to do. The industrial fury which has subdued a continent, and brought it under the hard American hand, wrought in him, according to his quality, and he was not only willing but eager to sacrifice the scruples of delicacy he had in appealing to a man whom he had sought first on such different terms. His only question was how to get his business quickly, clearly, and fully before him.