"Always running yourself down! There speaks the artist!"

"I'm not modest," he said anxiously. "I just know they're bad."

Mr. Pembroke's teeth were clear of meringue, and he could refrain
no longer. "My dear Rickie, your father and mother are dead, and
you often say your aunt takes no interest in you. Therefore your
life depends on yourself. Think it over carefully, but settle,
and having once settled, stick. If you think that this writing is
practicable, and that you could make your living by it--that you
could, if needs be, support a wife--then by all means write. But
you must work. Work and drudge. Begin at the bottom of the ladder
and work upwards."

Rickie's head drooped. Any metaphor silenced him. He never
thought of replying that art is not a ladder--with a curate, as
it were, on the first rung, a rector on the second, and a bishop,
still nearer heaven, at the top. He never retorted that the
artist is not a bricklayer at all, but a horseman, whose business
it is to catch Pegasus at once, not to practise for him by
mounting tamer colts. This is hard, hot, and generally ungraceful
work, but it is not drudgery. For drudgery is not art, and cannot
lead to it.

"Of course I don't really think about writing," he said, as he
poured the cold water into the coffee. "Even if my things ever
were decent, I don't think the magazines would take them, and the
magazines are one's only chance. I read somewhere, too, that
Marie Corelli's about the only person who makes a thing out of
literature. I'm certain it wouldn't pay me."