It was in the third year of the White Hope's life that the placidevenness of Kirk's existence began to be troubled. The orderlyprocession of the days was broken by happenings of unusual importance,one at least of them extraordinarily unpleasant. This was the failureof a certain stock in which nearly half of Kirk's patrimony wasinvested, that capital which had always seemed to him as solid a partof life as the asphalt on which he walked, as unchangeable a part ofnature as the air he breathed. He had always had it, and he couldhardly bring himself to realize that he was not always to have it.

　　It gave him an extraordinary feeling of panic and discomfort when atlength he faced the fact squarely that his private means, on thepossession of which he had based the whole lazy scheme of his life,were as much at the mercy of fate as the stake which a gambler flingson the green cloth. He did not know enough of business to understandthe complicated processes by which a stock hitherto supposed to be asimpregnable as municipal bonds had been hammered into a ragged remnantin the course of a single day; but the result of them was unpleasantlyclear and easily grasped.

　　His income was cut in half, and instead of being a comfortably offyoung man, idly watching the pageant of life from a seat in the grandstand, he must now plunge into the crowd and endeavour to earn a livingas others did.

　　For his losses did not begin and end with the ruin of this particularstock. At intervals during the past two years he had been nibbling athis capital, and now, forced to examine his affairs frankly andminutely, he was astonished at the inroads he had made upon it.

　　There had been the upkeep of the summer shack he had bought inConnecticut. There had been expenses in connection with WilliamBannister. There had been little treats for Ruth. There had been cigarsand clothes and dinners and taxi-cabs and all the other trifles whichcost nothing but mount up and make a man wander beyond the bounds ofhis legitimate income.

　　It was borne in upon Kirk, as he reflected upon these things, that theonly evidence he had shown of the possession of the artistictemperament had been the joyous carelessness of his extravagance. Inthat only had he been the artist. It shocked him to think how littlehonest work he had done during the past two years. He had lived in agolden haze into which work had not entered.

　　He was to be shocked still more very soon.

　　Stung to action by his thoughts, he embarked upon a sweeping attack onthe stronghold of those who exchange cash for artists' dreams. Heransacked the studio and set out on his mission in a cab bulging withlarge, small, and medium-sized canvases. Like a wave receding from abreakwater he returned late in the day, a branded failure.

　　The dealers had eyed his canvases, large, small, and medium-sized, and,in direct contravention of their professed object in life, had refusedto deal. Only one of them, a man with grimy hands but a moderatelygolden heart, after passing a sepia thumb over some of the moreambitious works, had offered him fifteen dollars for a little sketchwhich he had made in an energetic moment of William Bannister crawlingon the floor. This, the dealer asserted, was the sort of "darned mushystuff" the public fell for, and he held it to be worth the fifteen, butnot a cent more. Kirk, humble by now, accepted three battered-lookingbills and departed.