The World of Chance by William Dean Howells

The disappointment which Ray had to suffer would have been bad enough / simply as the refusal of his book; with the hope raised in him and then / crushed after the first great defeat, the trial was doubly bitter. It / was a necessity of his suffering and his temperament to translate it / into some sort of literary terms, and he now beguiled his enforced / leisure by beginning several stories and poems involving his experience. / One of the poems he carried so far that he felt the need of another eye / on it to admire it and confirm him in his good opinion of it; he / pretended that he wanted criticism, but he wanted praise. He would have / liked to submit the poem to Kane; but he could not do this now, though / the coldness between them was tacit, and they met as friends when they / met. He had a vulgar moment when he thought it would be a fine revenge / if he could make Kane listen to that passage of his poem which described / the poet's betrayal by a false friend, by the man who held his fate in / his hand and coolly turned against him. Kane must feel the sting of / self-reproach from this through all the disguises of time and place / which wrapped it; but the vulgar moment passed, and Ray became disgusted / with that part of his poem, and cut it out.

As it remained then, it was the pathetic story of a poet who comes up to / some Oriental court with his song, but never gains a hearing, and dies / neglected and unknown; he does not even achieve fame after death. Ray / did not know why he chose an Oriental setting for his story, but perhaps / it was because it removed it farther from the fact, and made it less / recognizable. It would certainly lend itself more easily to illustration / in that shape, if he could get some magazine to take it.

When he decided that he could not show it to Kane, and dismissed a / fleeting notion of Mr. Brandreth as impossible, he thought of Miss / Hughes. He had in fact thought of her first of all, but he had to feign / that he had not. There had lingered in his mind a discomfort concerning / her which he would have removed much sooner if it had been the only / discomfort there; mixed with his other troubles, his shame for having / indelicately urged her to speak of his story when he saw her last, did / not persist separately or incessantly. He had imagined scenes in which / he repaired his error, but he had never really tried to do so. It was / now available as a pretext for showing her his poem; he could make it / lead on to that; but he did not own any such purpose to himself when he / put the poem into his pocket and went to make his tardy excuses.

The Hughes family were still at table when Denton let him into their / apartment, and old Hughes came himself into the front room where Ray was / provisionally shown, and asked him to join them.

"My children thought that I was wanting in the finer hospitalities when / you were here before, and I forced my superabundance of reasons upon / you. I forget, sometimes, that no man ever directly persuaded me, in my / eagerness to have people think as I do. Will you show that you have / forgiven me by eating salt with us?"

"There is a little potato to eat it on, Mr. Ray," Mrs. Denton called / gayly from the dining-room; and as Ray appeared there, Peace rose and / set a plate for him next the old man. In front were the twins in high / chairs, one on each side of their father, who from time to time put a / knife or fork or cup and saucer beyond their reach, and left them to / drub the table with nothing more offensive than their little soft fists.

There were not only potatoes, but some hot biscuits too, and there was / tea. Ray had often sat down to no better meal at his father's table, and / he thought it good enough, even after several years' sophistication in / cities.

"There was to have been steak," Mrs. Denton went on, with a teasing look / at her husband, "but Ansel saw something on the way home which took away / his appetite so completely that he thought we wouldn't want any steak."

Hughes began to fill himself with the tea and biscuit and potatoes, and / he asked vaguely, "What did he see?"

"Oh, merely a family that had been put out on the sidewalk for their / rent. I think that after this, when Ansel won't come home by the / Elevated, he ought to walk up on the west side, so that he can get some / good from the exercise. He won't see families set out on the sidewalk in / Fifth Avenue."

Ray laughed with her at her joke, and Peace smiled with a deprecating / glance at Denton. Hughes paid no heed to what they were saying, and / Denton said: "The more we see and feel the misery around us, the better. / If we shut our eyes to it, and live in luxury ourselves" --

"Oh, I don't call salt and potatoes luxury," exactly, said his wife.

Denton remained darkly silent a moment, and then began to laugh with the / helplessness of a melancholy man when something breaks through his / sadness. "I should like to see a family set out on Fifth Avenue for back / rent," he said, and he laughed on; and then he fell suddenly silent / again.

Ray said, for whatever relief it could give the situation, that it was / some comfort to realize that the cases of distress which one saw were / not always genuine. He told of a man who had begged of him at a certain / point that morning, and then met him a few minutes later, and asked alms / again on the ground that he had never begged before in his life. "I / recalled myself to him, and he apologized handsomely, and gave me his / blessing."

"Did he look as if he had got rich begging? " Denton asked.

"No; he looked as if he could have got a great deal richer working," Ray / answered, neatly.

Mrs. Denton laughed, but her laugh did not give him the pleasure it / would have done if Peace had not remained looking seriously at him.

"You think so," Denton returned. "How much should you say the average / laboring-man with a family could save out of his chances of wages?"