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When Philip Endicott was at Harvard, he wrote stories of undergraduate life suggested by things that had happened to himself and to men he knew. Under the title of “Tales of the Yard” they were collected in book form, and sold surprisingly well. After he was graduated and became a reporter on the New York Republic, he wrote more stories, in each of which a reporter was the hero, and in which his failure or success in gathering news supplied the plot. These appeared first in the magazines, and later in a book under the title of “Tales of the Streets.” They also were well received.

Then came to him the literary editor of the Republic, and said: “There are two kinds of men who succeed in writing fiction–men of genius and reporters. A reporter can describe a thing he has seen in such a way that he can make the reader see it, too. A man of genius can describe something he has never seen, or any one else for that matter, in such a way that the reader will exclaim: ‘I have never committed a murder; but if I had, that’s just the way I’d feel about it.’ For instance, Kipling tells us how a Greek pirate, chained to the oar of a trireme, suffers; how a mother rejoices when her baby crawls across her breast. Kipling has never been a mother or a pirate, but he convinces you he knows how each of them feels. He can do that because he is a genius; you cannot do it because you are not. At college you wrote only of what you saw at college; and now that you are in the newspaper business all your tales are only of newspaper work. You merely report what you see. So, if you are doomed to write only of what you see, then the best thing for you to do is to see as many things as possible. You must see all kinds of life. You must progress. You must leave New York, and you had better go to London.”

“But on the Republic,” Endicott pointed out, “I get a salary. And in London I should have to sweep a crossing.”

“Then,” said the literary editor, “you could write a story about a man who swept a crossing.”

It was not alone the literary editor’s words of wisdom that had driven Philip to London. Helen Carey was in London, visiting the daughter of the American Ambassador; and, though Philip had known her only one winter, he loved her dearly. The great trouble was that he had no money, and that she possessed so much of it that, unless he could show some unusual quality of mind or character, his asking her to marry him, from his own point of view at least, was quite impossible. Of course, he knew that no one could love her as he did, that no one so truly wished for her happiness, or would try so devotedly to make her happy. But to him it did not seem possible that a girl could be happy with a man who was not able to pay for her home, or her clothes, or her food, who would have to borrow her purse if he wanted a new pair of gloves or a hair-cut. For Philip Endicott, while rich in birth and education and charm of manner, had no money at all. When, in May, he came from New York to lay siege to London and to the heart of Helen Carey he had with him, all told, fifteen hundred dollars. That was all he possessed in the world; and unless the magazines bought his stories there was no prospect of his getting any more.

Friends who knew London told him that, if you knew London well, it was easy to live comfortably there and to go about and even to entertain modestly on three sovereigns a day. So, at that rate, Philip calculated he could stay three months. But he found that to know London well enough to be able to live there on three sovereigns a day you had first to spend so many five-pound notes in getting acquainted with London that there were no sovereigns left. At the end of one month he had just enough money to buy him a second-class passage back to New York, and he was as far from Helen as ever.