But success had lost Martin’s address, and her messengers no longer came to his door.  For twenty-five days, working Sundays and holidays, he toiled on “The Shame of the Sun,” a long essay of some thirty thousand words.  It was a deliberate attack on the mysticism of the Maeterlinck school—­an attack from the citadel of positive science upon the wonder-dreamers, but an attack nevertheless that retained much of beauty and wonder of the sort compatible with ascertained fact.  It was a little later that he followed up the attack with two short essays, “The Wonder-Dreamers” and “The Yardstick of the Ego.”  And on essays, long and short, he began to pay the travelling expenses from magazine to magazine.

During the twenty-five days spent on “The Shame of the Sun,” he sold hack-work to the extent of six dollars and fifty cents.  A joke had brought in fifty cents, and a second one, sold to a high-grade comic weekly, had fetched a dollar.  Then two humorous poems had earned two dollars and three dollars respectively.  As a result, having exhausted his credit with the tradesmen (though he had increased his credit with the grocer to five dollars), his wheel and suit of clothes went back to the pawnbroker.  The type-writer people were again clamoring for money, insistently pointing out that according to the agreement rent was to be paid strictly in advance.

Encouraged by his several small sales, Martin went back to hack-work.  Perhaps there was a living in it, after all.  Stored away under his table were the twenty storiettes which had been rejected by the newspaper short-story syndicate.  He read them over in order to find out how not to write newspaper storiettes, and so doing, reasoned out the perfect formula.  He found that the newspaper storiette should never be tragic, should never end unhappily, and should never contain beauty of language, subtlety of thought, nor real delicacy of sentiment.  Sentiment it must contain, plenty of it, pure and noble, of the sort that in his own early youth had brought his applause from “nigger heaven”—­the “For-God-my-country-and-the-Czar” and “I-may-be-poor-but-I-am-honest” brand of sentiment.

Having learned such precautions, Martin consulted “The Duchess” for tone, and proceeded to mix according to formula.  The formula consists of three parts:  (1) a pair of lovers are jarred apart; (2) by some deed or event they are reunited; (3) marriage bells.  The third part was an unvarying quantity, but the first and second parts could be varied an infinite number of times.  Thus, the pair of lovers could be jarred apart by misunderstood motives, by accident of fate, by jealous rivals, by irate parents, by crafty guardians, by scheming relatives, and so forth and so forth; they could be reunited by a brave deed of the man lover, by a similar deed of the woman lover, by change of heart in one lover or the other, by forced confession of crafty guardian, scheming relative, or jealous rival, by voluntary confession of same,