"I didn't need to think about it," he exclaimed. "I knew in a moment."
"Yes—but then you're different," she replied. "Let me go now; we'll talk about this—some other time."
"But you've said you loved me," he cried, striving to detain her.
"I—I think so," she breathed. "Oh—won't you let me get a little used to it?" she asked whimsically, and ran out of the room.
Charlie thoughtfully filled a pipe, and lit it, and threw himself back in his easy chair. "Now," he said, as he puffed thoughtfully—"now I shall really have something to work for, when I've made up my mind what's the best work to tackle. Why didn't I think of this before?"
CHAPTER VII
DREAMS
It is highly necessary, having regard to the fact that we have a hero—albeit a doubtful one—that we should not lose sight of him. Jimmy in a sense had almost lost sight of himself for a time, if the expression may be pardoned; lost sight, in fact, of that large personage, James Larrance, who had blossomed forth so well in print at one time.
For Jimmy had grown ambitious; and Jimmy had left behind him something of the old safe hack work, and had launched out a little. Fortune had smiled upon him a little to begin with; but he had soon discovered that in this more ambitious work editors were not so reasonable as that young man in the shirt-sleeves had once been, nor so ready to give advice and assistance. When the money did come in, it came in, as Jimmy would have expressed it, "in lumps"; but then the lumps were few and far between, and a man might well starve while he was waiting for the next lump to come to him. Jimmy almost starved, with some amount of cheerfulness; but he went on. For Jimmy had a way of setting his teeth, and going at the work in a bullet-headed fashion—and coming up whenever he was knocked down, and going at it again. Which was highly serviceable in the long run.