“All sorts of glory,” occurred to me.

“The paper will stand expenses up to a reasonable figure,” Callan reassured me.

“It’ll be a good joke for a time,” I said.  “I’m infinitely obliged to you.”

He warded off my thanks with both hands.

“I’ll just send a wire to Fox to say that you accept,” he said, rising.  He seated himself at his desk in the appropriate attitude.  He had an appropriate attitude for every vicissitude of his life.  These he had struck before so many people that even in the small hours of the morning he was ready for the kodak wielder.  Beside him he had every form of labour-saver; every kind of literary knick-knack.  There were book-holders that swung into positions suitable to appropriate attitudes; there were piles of little green boxes with red capital letters of the alphabet upon them, and big red boxes with black small letters.  There was a writing-lamp that cast an aesthetic glow upon another appropriate attitude—­and there was one typewriter with note-paper upon it, and another with MS. paper already in position.

“My God!” I thought—­“to these heights the Muse soars.”

As I looked at the gleaming pillars of the typewriters, the image of my own desk appeared to me; chipped, ink-stained, gloriously dusty.  I thought that when again I lit my battered old tin lamp I should see ashes and match-ends; a tobacco-jar, an old gnawed penny penholder, bits of pink blotting-paper, match-boxes, old letters, and dust everywhere.  And I knew that my attitude—­when I sat at it—­would be inappropriate.

Callan was ticking off the telegram upon his machine.  “It will go in the morning at eight,” he said.

CHAPTER THREE

To encourage me, I suppose, Callan gave me the proof-sheets of his next to read in bed.  The thing was so bad that it nearly sickened me of him and his jobs.  I tried to read the stuff; to read it conscientiously, to read myself to sleep with it.  I was under obligations to old Cal and I wanted to do him justice, but the thing was impossible.  I fathomed a sort of a plot.  It dealt in fratricide with a touch of adultery; a Great Moral Purpose loomed in the background.  It would have been a dully readable novel but for that; as it was, it was intolerable.  It was amazing that Cal himself could put out such stuff; that he should have the impudence.  He was not a fool, not by any means a fool.  It revolted me more than a little.

I came to it out of a different plane of thought.  I may not have been able to write then—­or I may; but I did know enough to recognise the flagrantly, the indecently bad, and, upon my soul, the idea that I, too, must cynically offer this sort of stuff if I was ever to sell my tens of thousands very nearly sent me back to my solitude.  Callan had begun very much as I was beginning now; he had even, I believe, had ideals in his youth and had starved a little.  It was rather trying to think that perhaps I was really no more than another Callan, that, when at last I came to review my life, I should have much such a record to look back upon.  It disgusted me a little, and when I put out the light the horrors settled down upon me.