Anderson laughed.  “Yes,” he replied.  “People must eat to live, but they can live without legal wisdom.  I found butter and eggs were more salable.”

Carroll continued to regard him with that pathetic, wondering curiosity.  “And you have never regretted the change?” he asked.

“I don’t say that, but, regret or not, I had to make it, and—­I am not exactly sure that I do regret it.”

“But this—­this new occupation of yours cannot be—­precisely congenial.”

“That does not disturb me,” Anderson said, a little impatiently.

Carroll looked at him with understanding.  “I see you feel as I do about that,” he said.  “It is rather proving one’s self of the common to hold back too strenuously from it, and yet”—­he hesitated a moment—­“it takes courage, though,” he said.  Suddenly his eyes upon the other man became full of admiration.  “My daughter tells me, or, rather, my son told me principally, that you are interested in entomology?” he said.

“Oh, I dabble a little in it,” Anderson replied, smiling.

Carroll’s eyes upon him continued to hold their wistful questioning, admiring expression.  Anderson began to wonder what he had come for.  He was puzzled by the whole affair.  Carroll, too, seemed to present himself to him under a new guise.  He wondered if his reverses had brought about the change.

“I do not wish,” said Carroll, “to display curiosity about affairs which do not concern me, and I trust you will pardon me and give me information, or not, as you choose; but may I ask how you happened, when you became convinced that you were not to make a success in law, why you chose your present business?”

“I have not the slightest objection to answering,” said Anderson, although he began to wonder if the other had called simply for the purpose of gratifying his curiosity about his affairs—­“not the slightest.  I simply tried to think of something which I should be sure to sell, because people would be sure to buy, and I thought of—­butter and cheese.  It all seems exceedingly simple to me, the principle of obtaining enough money wherewith to live and buy the necessaries of life.  It is only to look about and possibly within and see what wares you can command, for which people will be willing to give their own earnings.  It is all a question of supply and demand.  First you must study the demand, and then your own power of supply.  If you can interpret law like Rufus Choate, why, sell that; if you can edit like Horace Greeley, sell that; if you can act like Booth or sing like Patti, sell that; if you can dance like Carmencita, sell that.  It all remains with you, what you can do, sing or dance, or sway a multitude, or sell butter and eggs; or possibly, rather, it remains with the public and what it decides you can do—­that is better for one’s vanity.”

“Decidedly,” agreed Carroll, with an odd, reflective expression.

“If the public want your song or your novel or your speech, they will buy it, or your dance, and if they don’t they won’t, and you cannot make them.  You have to sell what the public want to buy, for you yourself are only a unit in a goodly number of millions.”