Nearly six months had passed since Dick had arrived at the melancholy conclusion that the novel was a failure. He had borne his disappointment manfully, working harder than ever and making himself not only by all means the best reporter on the Transport, but one of the very best in New York. Besides his regular work, he had been doing a number of humorous sketches for his own paper and for the syndicates, and they had proved as popular as the best of his descriptive articles. With these and his Transport pay he had added largely to his savings, and nothing seemed lacking to make him happy but the one thing he had striven for and failed to obtain. “Oh, ho!” Darling exclaimed. “Going to do some more writing, are you? I thought you’d hardly be satisfied with one trial, and that a failure. Is it another novel, Dick?” A weaker man might have been confused at the mere mention of novel-writing after such a decided rebuff, but Dick saw nothing to be ashamed of in the failure he had made. He had done his best, and though the result was unfortunate, it was not disgraceful. “I have not given up the idea of novel-writing,” he answered; “not by any means. But I know a heap more than I did a year ago, Darling. I can see now that I was one of the fools who ‘rush in where angels fear to tread.’ I was entirely too young and inexperienced then to undertake a novel, just as I am now. I tried to fly too high. I wonder that you didn’t tell me so, for you must have known it.” “I am delighted to hear you say so, Dick,” Darling answered. “Of course I knew it. But I saw that you had your heart set upon writing a novel, and I thought the best way was to let you find out for yourself. You had had so much success with your newspaper articles that it was natural for you to think yourself something of a writer. Nothing but experience, I knew, would teach you that a man needs great knowledge of the world and of human nature to write a really good novel. “You learned that,” Darling went on; “and from the way you swallowed the unpleasant medicine I knew that some good would come of it. There was no sulking about you, no bitterness, no repining. You pitched into newspaper work harder than ever and fell to reading whenever you had a chance. I may tell you now, though I did not want to raise your hopes at the time, that I found a great deal of the real stuff in your novel when I read it. The construction was bad and the style rather stilted (two faults that were pretty sure to kill it), but there was enough meat in it to convince me that you will write a real novel some day if you keep at it.”