Mr. Ault made a gesture of impatience.  “I wouldn’t give a damn for that sort of thing.  It is money thrown away.  If I should get one of the popular writers you refer to, the public would know he was hired.  If you lay your story out there, nobody will suspect anything of the sort.  It will be a clean literary novel.  Not travel, you understand, but a story, and the more love in it the better.  It will be a novelty.  You can run your car sixty miles an hour in exciting passages, everything will work into it.  When people travel on the road the pictures will show them the scenes of the story.  It is a big thing,” said Mr. Ault in conclusion.

“I see it is,” said Philip, rising at the hint that his time had expired.  “I am very much obliged to you, Mr. Ault, for your confidence in me.  But it is a new idea.  I will have to think it over.”

“Well, think it over.  There is money in it.  You would not start till about midsummer.  Good-day.”

A private car!  Travel like a prince!  Certainly literature was looking up in the commercial world.  Philip walked back to his publishers with a certain elasticity of step, a new sense of power.  Yes, the power of the pen.  And why not?  No doubt it would bring him money and spread his name very widely.  There was nothing that a friendly corporation could not do for a favorite.  He would then really be a part of the great, active, enterprising world.  Was there anything illegitimate in taking advantage of such an opportunity?  Surely, he should remain his own master, and write nothing except what his own conscience approved.  But would he not feel, even if no one else knew it, that he was the poet-laureate of a corporation?

And suddenly, as he thought how the clear vision of Evelyn would plunge to the bottom of such a temptation, he felt humiliated that such a proposition should have been made to him.  Was there nothing, nobody, that commercialism did not think for sale and to be trafficked in?

Nevertheless, he wrote to Alice about it, describing the proposal as it was made to him, without making any comment on it.

Alice replied speedily.  “Isn’t it funny,” she wrote, “and isn’t it preposterous?  I wonder what such people think?  And that horrid young pirate, Ault, a patron of literature!  My dear, I cannot conceive of you as the Pirate’s Own.  Dear Phil, I want you to succeed.  I do want you to make money, a lot of it.  I like to think you are wanted and appreciated, and that you can get paid better and better for what you do.  Sell your manuscripts for as good a price as you can get.  Yes, dear, sell your manuscripts, but don’t sell your soul.”

XX