“There’s some kind of a mixture, put up by the druggists, that helps men to stop the use of tobacco,” she called back from the door, “and I am going to send you some.”

The door closed, but opened again.

“I do, I do,” she whispered to him; and this time she was really gone.

Maria, with worshipful eyes that none the less were keen to note the texture of Ruth’s garments and the cut of them (a cut unknown that produced an effect mysteriously beautiful), saw her to the carriage.  The crowd of disappointed urchins stared till the carriage disappeared from view, then transferred their stare to Maria, who had abruptly become the most important person on the street.  But it was one of her progeny who blasted Maria’s reputation by announcing that the grand visitors had been for her lodger.  After that Maria dropped back into her old obscurity and Martin began to notice the respectful manner in which he was regarded by the small fry of the neighborhood.  As for Maria, Martin rose in her estimation a full hundred per cent, and had the Portuguese grocer witnessed that afternoon carriage-call he would have allowed Martin an additional three-dollars-and-eighty-five-cents’ worth of credit.

CHAPTER XXVII

The sun of Martin’s good fortune rose.  The day after Ruth’s visit, he received a check for three dollars from a New York scandal weekly in payment for three of his triolets.  Two days later a newspaper published in Chicago accepted his “Treasure Hunters,” promising to pay ten dollars for it on publication.  The price was small, but it was the first article he had written, his very first attempt to express his thought on the printed page.  To cap everything, the adventure serial for boys, his second attempt, was accepted before the end of the week by a juvenile monthly calling itself Youth and Age.  It was true the serial was twenty-one thousand words, and they offered to pay him sixteen dollars on publication, which was something like seventy-five cents a thousand words; but it was equally true that it was the second thing he had attempted to write and that he was himself thoroughly aware of its clumsy worthlessness.

But even his earliest efforts were not marked with the clumsiness of mediocrity.  What characterized them was the clumsiness of too great strength—­the clumsiness which the tyro betrays when he crushes butterflies with battering rams and hammers out vignettes with a war-club.  So it was that Martin was glad to sell his early efforts for songs.  He knew them for what they were, and it had not taken him long to acquire this knowledge.  What he pinned his faith to was his later work.  He had striven to be something more than a mere writer of magazine fiction.  He had sought to equip himself with the tools of artistry.  On the other hand, he had not sacrificed strength.  His conscious aim had been to increase his strength by avoiding excess of strength.  Nor had he departed from his love of reality.  His work was realism, though he had endeavored to fuse with it the fancies and beauties of imagination.  What he sought was an impassioned realism, shot through with human aspiration and faith.  What he wanted was life as it was, with all its spirit-groping and soul-reaching left in.