That night he had found in the post-office a story of whose acceptance he had been almost sure, accompanied by the miserable little formula which arouses at once wrath and humiliation.  Horace tore it up and threw the pieces along the road.  There was a thunder-shower coming up.  It scattered the few blossoms remaining on the trees, and many leaves, and the bits of the civilly hypocritical note of thanks and rejection flew with them upon the wings of the storm wind.

Horace gazed up at the clouds overhead, which looked like the rapids of some terrible, heavenly river overlapping each other in shell-like shapes and moving with intense fury.  He thought of Rose, and first hoped that she was in the house, and then reflected that he might as well give up all hope of ever marrying her.  The returned manuscript in his pocket seemed to weigh down his very soul.  He recalled various stories which he had read in the current magazines of late, and it seemed to him that his compared very favorably with them.  He tried to think of the matter judicially, as if the rejected story were not his own, and felt justified in thinking well of it.  He had a sickening sense of being pitted against something which he could not gainsay, which his own convictions as to the privilege of persons in authority to have their own opinions forbade him to question.

“The editors had a perfect right to return my story, even if it is every whit as worthy of publication, even worthier, than anything which has appeared in their magazine for a twelvemonth,” he told himself.

He realized that he was not dependent upon the public concerning the merit of his work—­he could not be until the work appeared in print—­but he was combating the opinions (or appealing to them) of a few men whose critical abilities might be biassed by a thousand personal matters with which he could not interfere.  He felt that there was a broad, general injustice in the situation, but absolute right as to facts.  These were men to whom was given the power to accept or refuse.  No one could question their right to use that power.  Horace said to himself that he was probably a fool to entertain for a moment any hope of success under such conditions.

“Good Lord!  It might depend upon whether the readers had indigestion,” he thought; and at the same time he accepted the situation with a philosophic pride of surrender.

“It’s about one chance in a good many thousand,” he told himself.  “If I don’t get the chance some other fellow does, and there’s no mortal way but to make the best of it, unless I act like a fool myself.”  Horace was exceedingly alive to the lack of dignity of one who kicked against the pricks.  He said to himself that if he could not marry Rose, if he could not ask her why, he must accept his fate, not attack it to his own undoing, nor even deplore it to his ignominy.