Elizabeth Jordan

“ Maxwell brought his hand down on the desk with an air of finality.
"Then you've got everything. Do you mean to tell me that a fellow like you can't earn enough to support himself? If you do, you're talking rot."
Harrington took this with his wide, guileless grin. He was not offended now, for he felt the friendly interest and sympathy under the other's words. His voice when he replied was gentler.
"I ain't sayin' I can't keep body an' soul together, foh maybe I can," he conceded. "But I'm sayin' that ain't life. I'm sayin' I ain't been fitted fo' wo'k. I ain't been educated. ”

“ We've taken in these things you're discovering—or we've had them driven into us at school. So—er—they're not new, and while we appreciate them we haven't got time to go over them all again. When you get up to modern fiction—the things people are reading to-day——"
With one expressive gesture of the hand Mr. Harrington demolished modern fiction.
"I ain't got time foh that, Mistah Maxwell," he said, respectfully. "I read one, an I regret to say, suh, that it was too much. I have looked into othe's, but I go no fu'thah. ”

“ Wilson's visage had almost a habit of hurt wonder. "Details" continued to absorb the activity of The Sunday Searchlight office, and Maxwell, the assistant editor, attended to them all, murmuring bitterly against his chief as he labored. ”

“ I've been No'th six weeks, and I've tried ha'd to find a place whah I could fit in, but th' ain't none. Men must be trained fuh wo'k; I ain't trained. I cyan't go back, foh the's no one thah, an' I hate the mountains."
Maxwell's reply was brief and to the point.
"Think you could learn to run our elevator without killing us all?" he inquired. "Well, you've got to. You've been talking awful guff, you know Now you're going to work, right here. We need a new man. The one we have has been drunk three days. You're going to run the elevator and get fifteen dollars a week to begin with. ”

“ There's no reason why you should give me ten thousand dollars, you know."
Harrington laughed a queer little laugh.
"Ain't they a reason?" he asked, lapsing in his earnestness into the careless grammar he had almost overcome. "Well, I guess I know moah than anyone else 'bout that. Do you remembah the fifteen dollahs you lent me the day I came heah? Well, suh—well, old man, I was sta'ving. I hadn't eaten fo' two days, an' I couldn't get wo'k, an' I couldn't beg. That's why I meant to kill myself. That money saved me. Now heah's this thing. It ain't money. It's an idea. ”

“ Maxwell, but that's no reason why I should keep on being one, is it? I've got to tell you something impo'tant, and I'm going to do it now. I can't write any more about literatuah of the past and lily-pads of the present, as you would say. Who ca'es about 'em? I don't. The wo'ld to-day is interested in the life of to-day. Men think about theah wo'k and theah incomes and theah homes and theah wives and theah children, and that's all they think about. And women think about men, and that's all they think about. And heah I'm writing all the time about literatuah—literatuah. ”

“ If he would write a series of short articles giving his point of view to the busy men and women of to-day, they should be 'good stuff'—a sort of artistic voice crying in the commercial wilderness, don't you see. ”