Chapter XXX

CHAPTER XXX

On a beautiful fall day, a day of similar Indian summer to that
which had seen their love declared the year before, Martin read his
"Love-cycle" to Ruth. It was in the afternoon, and, as before,
they had ridden out to their favorite knoll in the hills. Now and
again she had interrupted his reading with exclamations of
pleasure, and now, as he laid the last sheet of manuscript with its
fellows, he waited her judgment.

She delayed to speak, and at last she spoke haltingly, hesitating
to frame in words the harshness of her thought.

"I think they are beautiful, very beautiful," she said; "but you
can't sell them, can you? You see what I mean," she said, almost
pleaded. "This writing of yours is not practical. Something is
the matter - maybe it is with the market - that prevents you from
earning a living by it. And please, dear, don't misunderstand me.
I am flattered, and made proud, and all that - I could not be a
true woman were it otherwise - that you should write these poems to
me. But they do not make our marriage possible. Don't you see,
Martin? Don't think me mercenary. It is love, the thought of our
future, with which I am burdened. A whole year has gone by since
we learned we loved each other, and our wedding day is no nearer.
Don't think me immodest in thus talking about our wedding, for
really I have my heart, all that I am, at stake. Why don't you try
to get work on a newspaper, if you are so bound up in your writing?
Why not become a reporter? - for a while, at least?"

"It would spoil my style," was his answer, in a low, monotonous
voice. "You have no idea how I've worked for style."

"But those storiettes," she argued. "You called them hack-work.
You wrote many of them. Didn't they spoil your style?"

"No, the cases are different. The storiettes were ground out,
jaded, at the end of a long day of application to style. But a
reporter's work is all hack from morning till night, is the one
paramount thing of life. And it is a whirlwind life, the life of
the moment, with neither past nor future, and certainly without
thought of any style but reportorial style, and that certainly is
not literature. To become a reporter now, just as my style is
taking form, crystallizing, would be to commit literary suicide.
As it is, every storiette, every word of every storiette, was a
violation of myself, of my self-respect, of my respect for beauty.
I tell you it was sickening. I was guilty of sin. And I was
secretly glad when the markets failed, even if my clothes did go
into pawn. But the joy of writing the 'Love-cycle'! The creative
joy in its noblest form! That was compensation for everything."

Martin did not know that Ruth was unsympathetic concerning