The book was entitled Will Power and Self Mastery. Opposite the title page was a half-tone reproduction of the author—a face with a huge moustache and intensely knit brows. Henry studied it, speculating in a sort of despair as to whether he could ever bring himself to look like that. He knit his own brows. His hand strayed again to his own downy moustache.
He turned the pages. Read a sentence here and there. The book, though divided under various chapter headings, was really made up of hundreds of more or less pithy little paragraphs. These paragraphs—their substance mainly a rehandling of the work of Samuel Smiles, James Parton, and the Christian and Mental Scientists (though Henry didn't know this)—might easily have been shuffled about and arranged in other sequence, so little continuity of thought did they represent. One paragraph ran:—
The express train of Opportunity stops but once at your station. If you miss it, it will never again matter that you almost caught it.
Another was—
Practise concentration. Fix your mind on the job in hand. Aim to do it a little better than such a job was ever done before. It is related of Thomas Alva Edison that, at the early age of seven, he——
And this:—
Oh, how many a young man, standing at the parting of life's main roads, has lost for ever the golden opportunity because he stopped to light a cigarette!'
Henry replaced the book under the pile of exchanges. A copy of last week's Voice lay there.
It was the first time he had let an issue of the paper go by without reading and re-reading every line of his own work. But he had, during these five days, passed through one of life's great revolutions. Besides, he had been put on a salary basis. When on space-rates, it had been necessary to cut everything out and paste it up into a 'string' for measurement. It came to him now, with a warm little uprush of memory, that the best piece of writing he had ever done would be in this issue.
He opened the paper. There was his story, occupying all of page three that wasn't given up to advertisements. This was better than working. Besides, he ought to go over it. He settled down to it.