The World of Chance by William Dean Howells

From the club where the farewell dinner was given him, Ray went to the / depot of the East & West Railroad with a friend of his own age, and they / walked up and down the platform talking of their lives and their loves, / as young men do, till they both at once found themselves suddenly very / drowsy. They each pretended not to be so; his friend made a show of not / meaning to leave him till the through express should come along at two / o'clock and pick up the sleeping-car waiting for it on the side track; / and Ray feigned that he had no desire to turn in, but would much rather / keep walking and talking.

They got rid of each other at last, and Ray hurried aboard his sleeper, / and plunged into his berth as soon as he could get his coat and boots / off. Then he found himself very wakeful. The soporific first effect of / the champagne had passed, but it still sent the blood thumping in his / neck and pounding in his ears as he lay smiling and thinking of the / honor that had been done him, and the affection that had been shown him / by his fellow-townsmen. In the reflected light of these the future / stretched brightly before him. He scarcely felt it a hardship any more / that he should be forced to leave Midland by the business change which / had thrown him out of his place on the Midland _Echo_, and he certainly / did not envy the friend who had just parted from him, and who was going / to remain with the new owners. His mind kept, in spite of him, a sort of / grudge toward the Hanks Brothers who had bought the paper, and who had / thought they must reduce the editorial force as a first step towards / making the property pay. He could not say that they had treated him / unfairly or unkindly; they had been very frank and very considerate with / him; but he could not conceal from himself the probability that if they / had really appreciated him they would have seen that it would be a / measure of the highest wisdom to keep him. He had given the paper / standing and authority in certain matters; he knew that; and he smiled / to think of Joe Hanks conducting his department. He hoped the estimation / in which the dinner showed that his fellow-citizens held him, had done / something to open the eyes of the brothers to the mistake they had made; / they were all three at the dinner, and Martin Hanks had made a speech / expressive of regard and regret which did not reconcile Ray to them.

He now tried to see them as benefactors in disguise, and when he recalled / the words of people who said that they always thought he was thrown away / on a daily paper, he was willing to acknowledge that the Hankses had / probably, at least, not done him an injury. He had often been sensible / himself of a sort of incongruity in using up in ephemeral paragraphs, / and even leading articles, the mind-stuff of a man who had published / poems in the _Century_ Bric-à-brac and _Harper's_ Drawer, and had for / several years had a story accepted by the _Atlantic_, though not yet / printed. With the manuscript of the novel which he was carrying to New / York, and the four or five hundred dollars he had saved from his salary, / he felt that he need not undertake newspaper work at once again. He / meant to make a thorough failure of literature first. There would be / time enough then to fall back upon journalism, as he could always do.

He counted a good deal upon his novel in certain moods. He knew it had / weak points which he was not able to strengthen because he was too / ignorant of life, though he hated to own it; but he thought it had some / strong ones too; and he believed it would succeed if he could get a / publisher for it.

He had read passages of it to his friend, and Sanderson had praised / them. Ray knew he had not entered fully into the spirit of the thing, / because he was merely and helplessly a newspaper mind, though since Ray / had left the _Echo_, Sanderson had talked of leaving it too, and going / on to devote himself to literature in New York. Ray knew he would fail, / but he encouraged him because he was so fond of him; he thought now what / a good, faithful fellow Sanderson was. Sanderson not only praised the / novel to its author, but he celebrated it to the young ladies. They all / knew that Ray had written it, and several of them spoke to him about it; / they said they were just dying to see it. One of them had seen it, and / when he asked her what she thought of his novel, in the pretence that he / did not imagine she had looked at the manuscript, it galled him a little / to have her say that it was like Thackeray; he knew he had imitated / Thackeray, but he feigned that he did not know; and he hoped no one else / would see it. She recognized traits that he had drawn from himself, and / he did not like that, either; in the same way that he feigned not to / know that he had imitated Thackeray, he feigned not to know that he had / drawn his own likeness.

But the sum of what she said gave him great / faith in himself, and in his novel. He theorized that if its subtleties / of thought and its flavors of style pleased a girl like her, and at the / same time a fellow like Sanderson was taken with the plot, he had got / the two essentials of success in it. He thought how delicately charming / that girl was; still he knew that he was not in love with her. He / thought how nice girls were, anyway; there were lots of perfectly / delightful girls in Midland, and he should probably have fallen in love / with some of them if it had not been for that long passion of his early / youth, which seemed to have vastated him before he came there. He was / rather proud of his vastation, and he found it not only fine, but upon / the whole very convenient, to be going away heart-free.