"You have received your interest regularly, have you not?"
"Yes."
"Then you have nothing to worry about. I understand business, as well as the man's opportunities, and you do not."
"I did not ask out of curiosity, but because I shall be glad when you are doing well enough to let me have my eight thousand—"
"What do you want of it? Where could you get more interest?"
"Nowhere, possibly. But some day I shall want to take a vacation, a fling. I shall want to go to New York and Europe."
"And you would throw away your capital!"
"Why not? I have other capital in my profession; and, although you will find this difficult to grasp, in my head. I have practiced fiction writing for years. It is just ten months since I tried to get anything published, and I have recently had three stories accepted by New York magazines: one of the old group and two of the best of the popular magazines."
He looked at her with cold distaste, which deepened in a moment to alarm. "I hope you will not use your own name. These people who think themselves so much above us anyhow, look upon authors and artists and all that as about on a level with the working class—"
"I shall use my own name and ram it down their throats. They worship success like all the rest of the world. Their fancied distaste for people engaged in any of the art careers—with whom they practically never come in contact, by the way—is partly an instinctive distrust of anything they cannot do themselves and partly because they have an Elizabethan idea that all artists are common and have offensive manners."