“Did I tell you I was in that?  No?  I used to draw in school, and after I had worked in the Settlement here in New York, and while I was working down on the East Side, it came over me that maybe I had one talent wrapped in a napkin; and I have been taking lessons in Fifty-seventh Street with the thousand or two young women who do not know how to boil potatoes, but are pursuing the higher life of art.  I did not tell you this because I knew you would say that I am just as inconsistent as you are.  But I am not.  I have demonstrated the fact that neither I nor one in a hundred of those charming devotees to art could ever earn a living by art, or do anything except to add to the mediocrity of the amazing art product of this free country.

“And you will ask, what now?  I am going on in the same way.  I am going to be a doctor.  In college I was very well up in physiology and anatomy, and I went quite a way in biology.  So you see I have a good start.  I am going to attend lectures and go into a hospital, as soon as there is an opening, and then I mean to practice.  One essential for a young doctor I have in advance.  That is patients.  I can get all I want on the East Side, and I have already studied many of them.  Law and medicine are what I call real professions.”

However Celia might undervalue the calling that Philip had now entered on, he had about this time evidence of the growing appreciation of literature by practical business men.  He was surprised one day by a brief note from Murad Ault, asking him to call at his office as soon as convenient.

Mr. Ault received him in his private office at exactly the hour named.  Evidently Mr. Ault’s affairs were prospering.  His establishment presented every appearance of a high-pressure business perfectly organized.  The outer rooms were full of industrious clerks, messengers were constantly entering and departing in a feverish rapidity, servants moved silently about, conducting visitors to this or that waiting-room and answering questions, excited speculators in groups were gesticulating and vociferating, and in the anteroom were impatient clients awaiting their turn.  In the inner chamber, however, was perfect calm.  There at his table sat the dark, impenetrable operator, whose time was exactly apportioned, serene, saturnine, or genial, as the case might be, listening attentively, speaking deliberately, despatching the affair in hand without haste or the waste of a moment.

Mr. Ault arose and shook hands cordially, and then went on, without delay for any conventional talk.

“I sent for you, Mr. Burnett, because I wanted your help, and because I thought I might do you a good turn.  You see” (with a grim smile) “I have not forgotten Rivervale days.  My wife has been reading your story.  I don’t have much time for such things myself, but her constant talk about it has given me an idea.  I want to suggest to you the scene of a novel, one that would be bound to be a good seller.