LITMIR.BIZ

      VI.

      Ray put his manuscript back into its covering and took it under his arm. He meant to make a thorough trial of the publishers, and not to be discouraged by his failures as long as a publisher was left untried. He knew from his experience with the magazine editors that it would be a slow affair, and he must have patience. Some of the publishers, even if they did not look at his story, would keep it for days or weeks with the intention or the appearance of reading it, and if they did read it, they would of course want time for it. He expected this, and he calculated that it might very well take his manuscript six months to go the rounds of all the houses in New York. Yet he meant, if he could, to get it through sooner, and he was going to use his journalistic connection to make interest for it. He would have given everything but honor to have it known that he had written some things for Harper's and the Century; he did not wish, or he said to himself and stood to it that he did not wish, any favor shown his novel because he had written those things. At the same time he was willing the fact that he was the correspondent of the Midland Echo should help him to a prompt examination of his manuscript if it could; and he meant to let it be known that he was a journalist before he let it be known that he was an author.

      He formulated some phrases introducing himself in his newspaper character, as he walked up Broadway with his manuscript held tight under his arm, and with that lifting and glowing of the heart which a young man cannot help feeling if he walks up Broadway on a bright October morning. The sun was gay on the senseless façades of the edifices, littered with signs of the traffic within, and hung with effigies and emblems of every conceit and color, from the cornice to the threshold, where the show-cases crowded the passengers toward the curbstones, and to the cellarways that overflowed the sidewalks with their wares. The frantic struggle and jumble of these appeals to curiosity and interest jarred themselves to an effect of kaleidoscopic harmony, just as the multitudinous noises of the hoofs and wheels and feet and tongues broke and bruised themselves to one roar on the ear; and the adventurer among them found no offence in their confusion. He had his stake, too, in the tremendous game that all were playing, some fair and some foul, and shrieking out their bets in these strident notes; and he believed so much he should win that he was ready to take the chances of losing. From the stainless blue sky overhead the morning sun glared down on the thronged and noisy street, and brought out all its details with keen distinctness; but Ray did not feel its anarchy. The irregularity of the buildings, high and low, as if they were parts of a wall wantonly hacked and notched, here more and here less, was of the same moral effect to him as the beautiful spire of Grace Church thrilling heavenward like a hymn.

      He went along, wondering if he should happen to meet either of those young women whom he had befriended the evening before. He had heard that you were sure to meet somebody you knew whenever you stepped out on Broadway, and he figured meeting them, in fancy. He had decided to put them into his story of New York life, and he tried to imagine the character he should assign them, or rather one of them; the one who had given the old darkey a quarter out of his dollar. He did not quite know what to do with the child; something could be made of the child if it were older, but a mere baby like that would be difficult to manage in such a story as Ray meant to write. He wondered if it would do to have her deserted by her husband, and have the hero, a young literary adventurer, not at all like himself, fall in love with her, and then have them both die when the husband, a worthless, drunken brute, came back in time to prevent their marriage. Such a scheme would give scope for great suffering; Ray imagined a scene of renunciation between the lovers, who refused each other even a last kiss; and he felt a lump rise in his throat. It could be made very powerful.

      He evolved a character of reckless generosity for her from her beneficence to the old negro in the ferryboat Under that still, almost cold exterior, he made her conceal a nature of passionate impulse, because the story required a nature of that sort He did not know whether to have the husband finally die, and the lovers marry, or whether to have the lovers killed in an accident. It would be more powerful to have them killed; it would be so conventional and expected to have them happily married; but he knew the reader liked a novel that ended well. It would be at once powerful and popular to have them elope together. Perhaps the best thing he could do would be to have them elope; there was a fascination in the guilty thought; he could make such a denouement very attractive; but upon the whole he felt that he must not, for very much the same reason that he must not himself run off with his neighbor's wife.

      All the time that this went on in his mind, Ray was walking up Broadway, and holding fast to the novel under his arm, which the novel in his brain was eclipsing. His inner eye was fixed on the remembered face of that strange girl, or woman, whom he was fashioning into a fictitious heroine, but his outward vision roved over the women faces it encountered, and his taste made its swift selection among them, and his ambidextrous fancy wove romances around such as he found pretty or interesting enough to give his heart to. They were mostly the silly or sordid faces that women wear when they are shopping, and they expressed such emotions as are roused by the chase of a certain shade of ribbon, or the hope of getting something rich and fashionable for less than its worth. But youth is not nice, or else its eyes are keener than those of after-life; and Ray found many beautiful and stylish girls where the middle-aged witness would have seen a long procession of average second-rate young women. He admired their New-Yorky dash; he saw their difference in look and carriage from the Midland girls; and he wondered what they would be like, if he knew them. He reflected that he did not know anyone in New York; but he expected soon to be acquainted. If he got his novel taken he would very soon be known, and then his acquaintance would be sought. He saw himself launched upon a brilliant social career, and he suddenly had a difficulty presented to him which he had not foreseen a moment before; he had to choose between a brilliant marriage with a rich and well-born girl and fealty to the weird heroine of his story. The unexpected contingency suggested a new ending to his original story. The husband could die and the lovers be about to marry, when they could become aware that the rich girl was in love with the hero. They could

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