"I don't see what more is to happen to you—except bankruptcy," retorted Hemming.
"Oh, I intend getting down to work again right away," O'Rourke hastened to say. "That is part of my trouble," he added. "You know that Mr. Hudson, for all his good points, has some jolly queer notions in his head. He had not known me more than a week before he asked me to let scribbling alone and give business a chance. I told him that scribbling was good enough for me. He said prose was bad, but to see a bushy chap, six feet high, writing poetry, simply made him sick. I was mad, but—well, I was also afraid. I know him better now. He made me promise not to mention the conversation to Helen, and tried to fire my soul with the desire for banking. He even offered me a job. Well, to oblige him I determined to try to give up writing, and I've been struggling along now for nearly three weeks. Gad, I'm sick of it. Helen does not know, of course, what the matter is, and thinks I'm out of condition, or that her company is not inspiring; and all the time the finest things are swinging about in my head, and my fingers are itching for a good corky penholder. Last night I realized that both my money and peace of mind were leaving me, so I turned out early this morning and wrote seven verses to Helen, and sketched out two stories, and an article on the Jamaica fruit trade, and now I'm going to tell old Hudson that he can go—I mean that I will not consider his proposition a moment longer."
"And what about the lady?" asked Hemming.
"Who—Helen? Oh, she'll make it warm for her father when she hears about it, I can tell you," answered O'Rourke.
While Hemming interviewed Smith on household topics, O'Rourke scribbled a quatrain on his cuff, and then invented conversation between himself and Mr. Hudson. This form of amusement is exciting—better even than writing dialogue. One cannot help figuring as the hero. The best time for it is when you are walking alone, late at night, perhaps in a rainstorm. The ideas swing along with your stride, and the words patter with the rain. But O'Rourke, in his mood, found nine o'clock in the morning good enough, and, by the time Hemming was ready to go out, had made sixteen different wrecks of poor Hudson's ideas on the subject of authorship as a profession. His courage returned to its normal elevation, and as they walked along he entertained Hemming with his brave dreams of the future.
The friends parted company at the door of Hemming's publishers; O'Rourke took a car for an up-town resident quarter. He might have seen Mr. Hudson at his office, which was on Broadway, but he wanted to see Helen first, and assure himself of her support.
Helen was pleased, though surprised, at seeing him so early. She received him in the morning-room, which was delightfully informal. He asked her to ride with him at four o'clock, and spoke as if this was his reason for calling. But she thought not. Presently she caught sight of the neat lettering on the otherwise spotless cuff, and without so much as "by your leave" took hold of his wrist, pushed back his coat-sleeve, and read the quatrain.
"My dear boy," she said, "it is fine. And I was just beginning to fear that this old town had made you stupid, or—or that my companionship makes you dull. I wondered if, after all, I was not inspiring."
"You not inspiring!" exclaimed O'Rourke. "Why, I have had to smother more inspirations during the last few weeks than I ever had before in all my life. There's more inspiration in one of your eyelashes than in all the hair on all the heads of all the other people in the world."
"Silly," she said.