envelope. Why on earth was he re-reading it, when he knew every
phrase in it by heart, when for a month past he had seen it, night
after night, stand out in letters of flame against the darkness of
his sleepless lids?

"_It has been just the same with all the others you've shown me._"

That was the way they dismissed ten years of passionate unremitting
work!

"_You remember the result of 'The Lee Shore.'_"

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.