In one of the great juvenile periodicals he noted whole columns of incident and anecdote.  Here was a chance.  His paragraphs were returned, and though he tried repeatedly he never succeeded in placing one.  Later on, when it no longer mattered, he learned that the associate editors and sub-editors augmented their salaries by supplying those paragraphs themselves.  The comic weeklies returned his jokes and humorous verse, and the light society verse he wrote for the large magazines found no abiding-place.  Then there was the newspaper storiette.  He knew that he could write better ones than were published.  Managing to obtain the addresses of two newspaper syndicates, he deluged them with storiettes.  When he had written twenty and failed to place one of them, he ceased.  And yet, from day to day, he read storiettes in the dailies and weeklies, scores and scores of storiettes, not one of which would compare with his.  In his despondency, he concluded that he had no judgment whatever, that he was hypnotized by what he wrote, and that he was a self-deluded pretender.

The inhuman editorial machine ran smoothly as ever.  He folded the stamps in with his manuscript, dropped it into the letter-box, and from three weeks to a month afterward the postman came up the steps and handed him the manuscript.  Surely there were no live, warm editors at the other end.  It was all wheels and cogs and oil-cups—­a clever mechanism operated by automatons.  He reached stages of despair wherein he doubted if editors existed at all.  He had never received a sign of the existence of one, and from absence of judgment in rejecting all he wrote it seemed plausible that editors were myths, manufactured and maintained by office boys, typesetters, and pressmen.

The hours he spent with Ruth were the only happy ones he had, and they were not all happy.  He was afflicted always with a gnawing restlessness, more tantalizing than in the old days before he possessed her love; for now that he did possess her love, the possession of her was far away as ever.  He had asked for two years; time was flying, and he was achieving nothing.  Again, he was always conscious of the fact that she did not approve what he was doing.  She did not say so directly.  Yet indirectly she let him understand it as clearly and definitely as she could have spoken it.  It was not resentment with her, but disapproval; though less sweet-natured women might have resented where she was no more than disappointed.  Her disappointment lay in that this man she had taken to mould, refused to be moulded.  To a certain extent she had found his clay plastic, then it had developed stubbornness, declining to be shaped in the image of her father or of Mr. Butler.