"Good heavens, St. George," Chillingworth, the city editor, had
gnarled, "we don't carry wooden type. And nothing else would set up
this wooden stuff of yours. Where's some snap? Your first paragraph
reads like a recipe. Now put your soul into it, and you've got less
than fifteen minutes to do it in."

St. George recalled that his friend Amory, as "one hackneyed in the
ways of life," had gravely lifted an eyebrow at him, and the new men
had turned different colours at the thought of being addressed like
that before the staff; and St. George had recast the story and had
received for his diligence a New Jersey assignment which had kept
him until midnight. Haunting the homes of the club-women and the
common council of that little Jersey town, the trim white-and-brass
craft slipping down to the river's mouth had not ceased to lure him.
He had found himself estimating the value--in money--of the
bric-à-brac of every house, and the self-importance of every
alderman, and reflecting that these people, if they liked, might own
yachts of white and brass; yet they preferred to crouch among the
bric-à-brac and to discourse to him of one another's violations and
interferences. By the time that he had reached home that dripping
night and had put captions upon the backs of the unexpectant-looking
photographs which were his trophies, he was in that state of
comparative anarchy to be effected only by imaginative youth and a
disagreeable task.

Next day, suddenly as its sun, had come the news which had
transformed him from a discontented grappler with social problems to
the owner of stocks and bonds and shares in a busy mine and other
things soothing to enumerate. The first thing which he had added
unto these, after the departure of his mother and the bishop, had