At this period of his career he was assistant-editor of a weekly review, in charge of the book-column of an evening newspaper, the contributor of a signed weekly article on general subjects to the “Daily Herald,” and of a weekly London letter to an American syndicate. From this it will be seen that for a man not yet thirty he had achieved a position in journalism envied by many who had grown gray-headed in the game. But as Risca had written three or four novels which had all been rejected by all the publishers in London, he chose to regard himself as a man foiled in his ambitions. He saw himself doomed to failure. For him was the eternal toil of ploughing the sand; the Garden of Delight cultivated by the happy Blest--such as Fawcus of the club, who boasted of making over a thousand pounds for every novel he wrote, and of being able to take as much holiday as he chose--had its gilded gates closed against him forever. That the man of nine-and-twenty should grow embittered because he was not accepted by the world as a brilliant novelist is a matter for the derision of the middle-aged and for the pitying smile of the hoary; but it is a matter of woeful concern to twenty-nine, especially if twenty-nine be a young man of a saturnine temperament whom fate has driven to take himself seriously. In Risca's life there were misfortunes the reality of the pain of which was independent of age; others which were relative, as inseparable from youth as the tears for a bumped head are inseparable from childhood. Yet to the man they were all equally absolute. It is only in after-years, when one looks back down the vista, that one can differentiate.