“Yes, sir,” Martin said humbly.

“And I can advise you to go back to the grammar school for at least two years. Good day.”

“You see I was right,” said Ruth. “It is because you need the discipline of study. Professor Hilton is right, and if I were you, I’d go to night school.”

But if my days are taken up with work and my nights with school, when am I going to see you? – was Martin’s first thought. He said:

“It seems so babyish for me to go to night school. I can do the work quicker than they can teach me. It will be a loss of time – ” he thought of her – “and I can’t afford the time. I have no time to spare, in fact.”

She looked at him gently. “Physics and chemistry – you can’t do them without laboratory study; and you’ll find algebra and geometry almost hopeless with instruction. You need the skilled teachers, the specialists.”

Martin went back to his pearl-diving article.[65] After that he wrote an article on the sea as a career, and another on turtle-catching.[66] Then he tried, as an experiment, a short story, and he had finished six short stories and sent them to various magazines. He wrote, intensely, from morning till night, and late at night, except when he went to the reading-room, draw books from the library, or saw Ruth. He was profoundly happy. The joy of creation was his. All the life about him – the odors of stale vegetables and soapsuds, his sad sister, and the jeering face of Mr. Higginbotham – was a dream. The real world was in his mind, and the stories he wrote were reality.

The days were too short. There was so much he wanted to study. He cut his sleep down[67] to five hours.

In the meantime the weeks were passing, his money was coming out, and there was no money coming in. A month after the adventure story for boys was returned to him by THE YOUTH’S COMPANION. The SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER did the same: at the end of the fifth week the manuscript came back to him, by mail, without comment. In the same way his other articles came back from the other leading San Francisco papers. When he recovered them, he sent them to the magazines in the East, from which they were returned more promptly.

The short stories were returned in similar fashion. He read them over and over, and liked them so much that he could not understand the cause of their rejection. He decided to read some stories to his sister.

“That story was perfectly grand,” she announced; “but it makes me sad. I want to cry. There is too many sad things in the world anyway. It makes me happy to think about happy things. Where are you going to sell it?”

“Hm, that’s not so easy,” he laughed.

“But if you DID sell it, what do you think you’d get for it?”

“A hundred dollars.”

“Oh! I do hope you’ll sell it!”

“Easy money, eh?” Then he added proudly: “I wrote it in two days. That’s fifty dollars a day. But nobody wants to publish them.”

He wanted to read his stories to Ruth, but did not dare.

It was the circle of socialists and working-class philosophers that gathered in the City Hall Park[68] on warm afternoons that was responsible for the great discovery. Once or twice in the month, Martin listened to the arguments. The tone of discussion was much lower than at Mr. Morse’s table. The men were not grave and dignified. They lost their tempers easily.