Her vengeance wreaked, the virago rose and stalked triumphant as Minerva, back to some cryptic domestic retreat at the rear.  The janitor got to his feet, blown and humiliated.

“This is married life,” he said to Slayton, with a certain bruised humour.  “That’s the girl I used to lay awake of nights thinking about.  Sorry about your hat, mister.  Say, don’t snitch to the tenants about this, will yer?  I don’t want to lose me job.”

Slayton took the elevator at the end of the hall and went up to the offices of the Hearthstone.  He left the MS. of “Love Is All” with the editor, who agreed to give him an answer as to its availability at the end of a week.

Slayton formulated his great winning scheme on his way down.  It struck him with one brilliant flash, and he could not refrain from admiring his own genius in conceiving the idea.  That very night he set about carrying it into execution.

Miss Puffkin, the Hearthstone stenographer, boarded in the same house with the author.  She was an oldish, thin, exclusive, languishing, sentimental maid; and Slayton had been introduced to her some time before.

The writer’s daring and self-sacrificing project was this:  He knew that the editor of the Hearthstone relied strongly upon Miss Puffkin’s judgment in the manuscript of romantic and sentimental fiction.  Her taste represented the immense average of mediocre women who devour novels and stories of that type.  The central idea and keynote of “Love Is All” was love at first sight—­the enrapturing, irresistible, soul-thrilling feeling that compels a man or a woman to recognize his or her spirit-mate as soon as heart speaks to heart.  Suppose he should impress this divine truth upon Miss Puffkin personally!—­would she not surely indorse her new and rapturous sensations by recommending highly to the editor of the Hearthstone the novelette “Love Is All”?

Slayton thought so.  And that night he took Miss Puffkin to the theatre.  The next night he made vehement love to her in the dim parlour of the boarding-house.  He quoted freely from “Love Is All”; and he wound up with Miss Puffkin’s head on his shoulder, and visions of literary fame dancing in his head.

But Slayton did not stop at love-making.  This, he said to himself, was the turning point of his life; and, like a true sportsman, he “went the limit.”  On Thursday night he and Miss Puffkin walked over to the Big Church in the Middle of the Block and were married.

Brave Slayton!  Chateaubriand died in a garret, Byron courted a widow, Keats starved to death, Poe mixed his drinks, De Quincey hit the pipe, Ade lived in Chicago, James kept on doing it, Dickens wore white socks, De Maupassant wore a strait-jacket, Tom Watson became a Populist, Jeremiah wept, all these authors did these things for the sake of literature, but thou didst cap them all; thou marriedst a wife for to carve for thyself a niche in the temple of fame!