OWEN CAREY
and Sunday papers—chiefly for The Commercial Advertiser and The Sun—and his literary life was made up of such considerations as this: if The Commercial Advertiser paid only four dollars a column and The Sun paid eight, but The Sun printed 2,200 words in a column and The Commercial Advertiser had a column of 1,100, which was the more profitable to write for?
He was earning, on an average, about six dollars a week.
On this particular night he had been up Fifth Avenue as far as the Park and down Broadway to Madison Square, looking for a descriptive article of any sort, in the windows of the new Waldorf-Astoria, in the hansom cabs, in the theater crowds, in whatever he could see of the night life of the Tenderloin without paying for admittance. And he was on his way home, brooding over an article that he hoped to hatch out in his room and mail to an editor if it came to life.
He never went to the editorial offices with his contributions any more. He had never been able to pass the office-boy. He was too obviously a threadbare and eccentric literary aspirant; and literary aspirants are the bane of the newspaper editor, who does not understand why a man interested only in news should be persecuted by people who are interested only in literature.
It was raining on Carey—a cold October rain that rattled on the roof of his straw hat and squashed
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