“Then your inference is that at the end of three or four months A Modern Romeo will be selling at the rate of five hundred a day? I’m glad for Brandreth here, but I shall be dead by that time.”
“Oh no! Oh no!” Kane softly entreated, while he took Ray’s hand between his two hands. “One doesn’t really die of disappointed literature any more than one dies of disappointed love. That is one of the pathetic superstitions which we like to cherish in a world where we get well of nearly all our hurts, and live on to a hale old imbecility. Depend upon it, my dear boy, you will survive your book at least fifty years.” Kane wrung Ray’s hand, and got himself quickly away.
“There is a good deal of truth in what he says”—Mr. Brandreth began cheerfully.
“About my outliving my book?” Ray asked. “Thank you. There’s all the truth in the world in it.”
“I don’t mean that, of course. I mean the chances that it will pick up any time within three months, and make its fortune.”
“You’re counting on a lucky accident.”
“Yes, I am. I’ve done everything I can to push the book, and now we must trust to luck. You have to trust to luck in the book business, in every business. Business is buying on the chance of selling at a profit. The political economists talk about the laws of business; but there are no laws of business. There is nothing but chances, and no amount of wisdom can forecast them or control them. You had better be prudent, but if you are always prudent you will die poor. ‘Be bold; be bold; be not too bold.’ That’s about all there is of it. And I’m going to be cheerful too. I’m still betting on A Modern Romeo.” The young publisher leaned forward and put his hand on Ray’s shoulder, in a kindly way, and shook him a little. “Come! What will you bet that it doesn’t begin to go within the next fortnight? I don’t ask you to put up any money. Will you risk the copyright on the first thousand?”
“No, I won’t bet,” said Ray, more spiritlessly than he felt, for the proposition to relinquish a part of his copyright realized it to him. Still he found it safest not to allow himself any revival of his hopes; if he did it would be tempting fate to dash them again. In that way he had often got the better of fate; there was no other way to do it, at least for him.
XLI.
After a silent and solitary dinner, Ray went to see Mrs. Denton and Peace in their new lodging. It was the upper floor of a little house in Greenwich Village, which was sublet to them by a machinist occupying the lower floors; Ray vaguely recalled something in his face at his first visit, and then recognized one of the attendants at Hughes’s Sunday ministrations. He was disposed to fellowship Ray in Hughes’s doctrine, and in the supposition of a community of interest in Hughes’s daughters. They could not have been in better or kindlier keeping than that of the machinist’s friendly wife, who must have fully shared his notion of Ray’s relation to them. She always received him like one of the family, and with an increasing intimacy and cordiality.