For all that he ought to have given himself another decade before crying himself a failure, yet a brilliant young journalist who has not found a publisher for one of four novels has reasonable excuse for serious cogitation. There are scores of brilliant young journalists who have published masterpieces of fiction before they are thirty, and at forty have gone on their knees and thanked kind, gentle Time for his effacing fingers; yet the novels have had some quality of the novel warranting their publication. At any rate, the brilliant young journalists have believed in them. They have looked upon their Creation and found that it was good. But Risca, looking on his Creation, found that it was wood. His people were as wooden as Mr. and Mrs. Ham in a Noah's Ark; his scenery was as wooden as the trees and mountain in a toy Swiss village; his dialogue as wooden as the conversation-blocks used by the philosophers of Laputa. He had said, in an outburst of wrathful resentment, that he found his one artistic outlet in aiding to create Stella's Land of Illusion; and he was right. He was despairingly aware of the lack of the quick fancy; the power of visualization; the sublimated faculty of the child's make-believe, creating out of trumpery bits and pieces a glowing world of romance; the keen, instinctive knowledge of the general motives of human action; the uncanny insight into the hearts and feelings of beings of a sex, class, or type different from his own; the gift of evolving from a tiny broken bone of fact a perfect creature indisputably real, colouring it with the hues of actuality and breathing into it the breath of life--the lack, indeed, of all the essential qualities, artistic and therefore usually instinctive, that go to the making of a novelist. Yet Risca was doggedly determined to be a novelist and a poet. It was pathetic. How can a man who cannot distinguish between “God Save the King” and “Yankee Doodle” hope to write a world-shaking sonata? Risca knew that he was crying for the moon, and it is only because he cried so hard for it that he deserved any serious commiseration. When he did come to death-grapple with the absolute, the beasts above mentioned, he stood out a tragic young figure, fiercely alone in the arena, save for Herold. His name, uncommon and arresting, had one connotation in London--the Case, the appalling and abominable Case. Even Ferguson of the “Daily Herald,” who had evinced such sympathy for him at first, shrank from the name at the head of the weekly column and suggested the temporary use of a pseudonym. Had it not been for Herold's intervention, Risca would have told Ferguson to go to the devil and would have refused to work for his Philistine paper. He swallowed the insult, which did him no good. He refused to carry the accursed name into the haunts of men. “Come to the club, at any rate,” Herold urged. “Every man there is loyal to you.”