She smiled. She did not mean to be unsympathetic, but Kent hated her for it furiously as she turned her face.
"There's much in a name," she said with a shrug. "What's the difference, though? Your terms aren't bad, 'miserable one,' whether the name is mine or yours. By the way, I can work another tale for The Metropolis, if you'll knock it off for me; I was going to write to you."
Kent never appealed to her for pity again. But a little later there came a letter from Cynthia, replying to his brief announcement of Thurgate and Tatham's rejection. Her consolation and prophesies of "success yet" overflowed four sheets, and the man's throat was tight as he read them.
Well, he must do the tale for The Metropolis! But he would write some short stories for himself as well, he determined. It had not been a lucrative occupation when he essayed it before, but those early stories had been the wrong kind of thing—he perceived it now: he would write some short stories of the pattern that was so successful when it was signed "Eva Deane-Pitt."
He soon began to see his work over her signature in almost every paper that he looked at. If he turned the leaves of a magazine on a book-stall, a tale of his own met his eyes, signed "Eva Deane-Pitt"; if he picked up a periodical in a restaurant, a familiar sentence might flash out of the pages at him, and there would be another of his stories "By Eva Deane-Pitt." Yes, he would submit to the editors on his own account! He would not receive such terms as she, that he knew; he doubted strongly whether he would even receive so much as she spared to him after retaining the larger share. But he could, and he would, get what was dear to him—the recognition and the kudos to which he was entitled!
He found that he did not write so quickly for himself as in his capacity of ghost, but he was not discouraged, for he felt that he was writing better. For a week he did nothing for the woman at all; he wrote all day and half the night as "Humphrey Kent," and when a manuscript was declined by The Society Mirror he sent it to The Metropolis, and forwarded the story rejected by The Metropolis to The Society Mirror. He could not abandon his work for her entirely, but under the pressure that she put upon him, and his new interests, he wrote for her more and more hastily—wrote frank and unmitigated rubbish at last, and on one occasion candidly told her so.
She had telegraphed to him at six o'clock, begging him to call, and he had risen from his table feeling that his head was vacant. She clamoured for a two-thousand-word story by the first post the following morning, and insisted, as usual, that "anything would do." He assured her that he was too exhausted even to invent a motive; how could he produce two thousand words before he slept? She overruled his objections, hanging about him with caresses. She made him promise that the sketch should reach her in time.
"Write twaddle, dearest boy," was her parting injunction, "but write it! A motive? A mercenary girl jilts her lover because he is poor, and then her new fiancé loses his fortune, and the jilted lover succeeds to a dukedom! What does it matter? Write a story that Noah told to his family in the Ark—only cover enough pages. Write any rot; simply fill it out. I depend on you, Humphrey, mind!"
He went home and did it—on the lines she had laid down. She wanted drivel—she should have it! He did not stop to think at all. He wrote, without a pause or a correction, as rapidly as his pen would glide, and posted the tale to her before half-past ten. A note went with it.
"I have done as you ordered," he scribbled. "Don't blame me because no editor will take such muck now you are obeyed."