It must be for the thousandth time now he was sitting down at the neat table looking out on the little lawn, and trying to get his ideas together, trying to get something new, something startling, that would awaken these hard-boiled men who had control of theaters, magazines, publishing houses to the sense that he was alive, worth while, valuable. If he could only think up a new detective, or—or something.  
Any other than he would have given up the game long ago, but he knew he had talent—he would n't go quite so far as to say genius, but great talent. It was no use their turning him down all the time. He was certain they never read the stuff.
 
He was certain, too, there was some trick, some knack he had n't discovered. Just some little trick. These men of national, international fame—he could see from their faces they had no especial brains, any more than he had.
 
But just some little trick he could n't get.
 
He had taken courses in writing, gone to schools of journalism, and here were all his manuscripts with neat rejection slips; here was what he thought the great American novel battered and dog-eared, a study of the temptations of a girl in the great city; and here was his crook drama, that some filthy reader had marked with the rim of a coffee cup. It was enough to make a man quit.
 
But he would n't quit. He 'd be as big as the biggest of them. He, too, would have his pictures in the papers, not gaunt and bitter as most of them seemed, but pleasant, dignified, literary. And his picture would look like an author's, with its well-marked features, its masculine little mustache, its intellec............