Good God--as if he were likely to forget it! He re-lived it all
now in a drowning flash: the persistent rejection of the play,
his sudden resolve to put it on at his own cost, to spend ten
thousand dollars of his inheritance on testing his chance of
success--the fever of preparation, the dry-mouthed agony of the
"first night," the flat fall, the stupid press, his secret rush
to Europe to escape the condolence of his friends!

"IT ISN'T AS IF YOU HADN'T TRIED ALL KINDS."

No--he had tried all kinds: comedy, tragedy, prose and verse, the
light curtain-raiser, the short sharp drama, the bourgeois-
realistic and the lyrical-romantic--finally deciding that he
would no longer "prostitute his talent" to win popularity, but
would impose on the public his own theory of art in the form of
five acts of blank verse. Yes, he had offered them everything--
and always with the same result.

Ten years of it--ten years of dogged work and unrelieved failure.
The ten years from forty to fifty--the best ten years of his
life! And if one counted the years before, the silent years of
dreams, assimilation, preparation--then call it half a man's
life-time: half a man's life-time thrown away!

And what was he to do with the remaining half? Well, he had
settled that, thank God! He turned and glanced anxiously at the
clock. Ten minutes past eight--only ten minutes had been
consumed in that stormy rush through his whole past! And he must
wait another twenty minutes for Ascham. It was one of the worst
symptoms of his case that, in proportion as he had grown to