Guild had besought him for another masterpiece. It seemed fairly certain that he would receive the accolade of the dramatic critics for having written the best play of the season and that he would inevitably be awarded the Pulitzer Prize. The ultimate result of these and sundry other flattering attentions was to frighten Ambrose Deacon half out of his wits.
Arriving in the metropolis from an inland state some fifteen years previously, he had held positions of one kind or another on a newspaper for ten years, until the stories he was beginning to write about the quaint characters he had known in his boyhood began to bring in enough money to assure him it would be safe to resign his reportership in order to devote himself to what Joseph Hergesheimer had so fittingly described as "a career of beautiful letters." Ambrose wrote without self-consciousness of events and persons that his memory had retained from the years he had passed in the small middle western town of his birth. Typing these tales neatly and dispatching them to plausible periodicals, he was fairly certain to receive a cheque in return.
It was his habit to write most of the day. In the evening, after a plain dinner at some quiet restaurant, Italian or Hungarian, near his home, some-
