"That's comforting, as far as it goes; but I should think you might say something a little less carefully polarized. You don't have a chance to congratulate lucky people every day."
Griswold looked up with a smile that was almost ill-natured, and quoted cynically: "'Unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not, shall be taken away even that which he hath.'"
Bainbridge's laugh was tolerant enough to take the edge from his retort.
"That's a pretty thing to fling at a man who never knifed you or pistoled you or tried to poison you! An innocent by-stander might say you envied me."
"I do," rejoined Griswold gravely. "I envy any man who can earn enough money to pay for three meals a day and a place to sleep in."
"Oh, cat's foot!—anybody can do that," asserted Bainbridge, with the air of one to whom the struggle for existence has been a mere athlete's practice run.
"I know; that is your theory. But the facts disprove it. I can't, for one."
"Oh, yes, you could, if you'd side-track some of your own theories and come down to sawing wood like the rest of us. But you won't do that."
Griswold was a fair man, with reddish hair and beard and the quick and sensitive skin of the type. A red flush of anger crept up under the closely cropped beard, and his eyes were bright.
"That is not true, and you know it, Bainbridge," he contradicted, speaking slowly lest his temper should break bounds. "Is it my fault, or only my misfortune, that I can do nothing but write books for which I can't find a publisher? Or that the work of a hack-writer is quite as impossible for me as mine is for him?"