"What special use have you for a little more money?" Prime asked curiously.
"Travel," she said succinctly. "I should like to see the world; all of it."
"That wouldn't take so very much money. Goodness knows, the pen isn't much of a mining-pick, but with it I have contrived to dig out a year in Europe."
"You couldn't have done it teaching the daughters of retired farmers how to cook rationally," she averred. "Besides, my earning year is only nine months long."
"Then you really do want money?"
"Yes; not much money, but just enough. That is, if there is any such half-way stopping-point for the avaricious."
"There is," he asserted. "I have found it for myself. I should like to have money enough to enable me to write a book in the way a book ought to be written—in perfect leisure and without a single distracting thought of the royalty check. No man can do his best with one eye fixed firmly upon the treasurer's office."
"I had never thought of that," she mused. "I always supposed a writer worked under inspiration."
"So he does, the inspiration of the butcher and the baker and the anxious landlord. I can earn a living; I have done it for a number of years; but it is only a living for one, and there isn't anything to put aside against the writing of the leisurely book—or other things."
"Oh! then you have other ambitions, too."