His one glimmer of hope was that Cordelia might yet be able to sell a short story or two for him. And with that glimmer came a sudden passion to repay her in full for anything she might do. For once, and at last, his time and energy were his own. Remembering this, he read again his copy of The Unwise Virgins, and before noon of his first free day he was deep at work on his reconstruction of that halting story.
The sense of freedom that came with such work appealed to him. His liberated mind raced like a colt up and down the unfamiliar uplands of the imagination. For three delirious, fleeting days he struggled and battled with the manuscript, writing late into the night, losing himself in his work, medicining his little worries with the great balm of creation, with the unction of tangible accomplishment.
On the morning of the fourth day--a bright September morning with the sparrows twittering and bustling busily about the sunlit housetops, he received an unlooked-for note from Cordelia. He turned it over many times wonderingly, and then opened it over his modest breakfast of coffee and oatmeal porridge. In it was a crisp, spotless check for one hundred and ten dollars and a playfully peremptory command to send on another story at once. She ended with a line or two of congratulations, and casually asked when she was to see him again.
These closing sentences were skimmed over almost unnoticed by Hartley. One hundred and ten dollars! Never before had he been paid so handsomely. He looked at the check again, and wondered just where he could get it cashed. And still again he held it up to the light and looked at it, and a great content stole over him. It was the beginning.
How bright that morning the sun lay on the housetops and chimneys, and how the elevated trains whisked and danced and frolicked past his vibrating window! The dust that hung over the city seemed a mantle of soft gold. The smell of the open street was a new perfume to him.
He went back to his work happy, light-hearted, assured. He felt come over him a new sense of power and freedom. With it the fires of creation seemed to burn and rage within him. For all time the week that followed remained a blurred and vague memory to him--a memory of hurried and half-eaten meals of chuck steak and strong coffee, of much tobacco-smoke, of feverish snatches at the fresh air by night, of unsettled sleep and an aching anxiety to be once more at work. His brain seemed to have taken the bit in its teeth and run away with him, though not, he knew, as Cordelia's had once bolted despairingly over the same pages.