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Myron did not merely bore him but furiously irritated him by incessant, clumsy, pawing hints about leading what he comically called a 'more regular life'. Yet he had to see Myron often. He had to live! And he really liked Myron's new wife--a kid from their own home town, Effie May Lambkin. She was good fun, for she thought Ora was the wittiest man she had known, and worshipped him instead of trying to get cute, like so many of these women. She was always glad to order up a late supper for him or, when Myron got stuffy, to lend him enough to get through till Monday.

Ora was proud of the fact that, though Effie May was a beauty, in a coarse, hoydenish sort of way, he was so loyal to the family that he had made practically no effort to seduce her. And then Myron thought he was a rounder!

Oh yes, he was busier than his brother could possibly know, and he had to do everything by himself, without any help from a crew of clerks and stenographers such as Myron had, so that Myron could sit on his bottom and never do any real work at all. Say what they liked, Ora knew that he was systematic. He had compiled a list of fifty fellow American authors who were sufficiently well rewarded, i.e., commercial, so that they were worth soliciting, and he spent days in composing a letter confiding to these colleagues his difficulties, which were, it appeared, as follows: he was engaged in the last fatiguing months of finishing a long novel, his wife was ill, his two children were hungry and without enough clothing to go to school, his rent was unpaid, and unless the benefactor could send him three hundred dollars at once, the whole bunch of them would have to commit suicide. This form letter he changed only in the first paragraph, in which he mentioned several books by the author--which was easy, because they were all listed in Who's Who--and the last, where in the simple, grave-eyed manner of a genius willing to face starvation and bend his pride to begging, he explained that though they had not met him personally, through the master's books (give titles) he knew his kindness, justice, and astounding knowledge of human nature.

On the first letter, from fifty prospects he had sixteen answers, with seven refusals, and nine cheques ranging from ten dollars to one hundred and fifty, in total, six hundred and five dollars. None of them sent the full three hundred, but they crawled with apology for not doing so, which was precisely his reason for having put it so high.

On a second letter to the thirty-four hounds who had not answered, he collected eleven more replies, with another hundred and thirty dollars, netting seven hundred and thirty-five dollars for six days' work--two days composing the form and four in typing the letters, and if the swell-head Myron could ever do as well as that, Ora would just like to know! Beaming upon his honestly and arduously earned pile, Ora went on a splendid drunk with Colonel Falkenstein, Wilson Ketch and, from time to time, various girls, most of whom he did not remember having met before. They did, though.

Sober again, and very sick, with only sixteen dollars left of the seven hundred and thirty-five, and three months' rent due for his attic, Ora devoted himself to the twenty-three megalomaniacs who even yet had not been courteous enough to answer. Regarding these snobs, he had an airy wine-born plan. He wrote them a third time, not tenderly but insultingly. They were, he eloquently put it, boors, ingrates, cowards, and reactionaries. While they were making fools of themselves by trying to ape the rich with their Palm Beach villas, Vermont stock farms, and royal suites on liners, he was forced to support himself by stoking furnaces twelve hours a night, that he might devote himself to creating a Real American Art.

This drew, from the twenty-three, twelve more blanks, three cheques, and eight letters of furious reply. It was for the last that he had really been hoping. Here he had eight original and unpublished manuscripts, three of them holograph, in which eight of the most competent writers in America ungrudgingly devoted themselves and their noblest blasphemy to making it clear that they regarded him as a liar, a crook, and a damned nuisance. He read them with shouts of happiness, and bustled out to sell them to an autograph dealer, at from three to sixty dollars apiece.

He made second and third and fourth lists of fifty philanthropists each, extending his sales-appeal from the innocent composers of books to newspaper editorial writers, colyumists, cartoonists, playwrights, and rich women reported as having attended public poetry-readings, and he widened his selling area to take in Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, France, and Germany. Each three months he made a spirited campaign of high-pressure-salesmanship, and cannily did not return to any list oftener than once a year.

So on the whole, the Ora who with shy boyishness, with wistfully quivering thick lips, showed to Myron and Effie May the gin-scented attic in which he had to live, had a slightly larger income than Myron's, which thought made him laugh secretly but very much.

Though he gallantly continued with his books and infrequent magazine fiction, and though his four lists demanded so much painful typing, Ora was most occupied by ghosting--the writing of books to be signed by other and more famous persons. He came to have rather a sound reputation for the work, and various publishers sent for him, though they disgusted him by sourly refusing to pay one penny till the work was done--the dirty money-grubbers! Thus, at various times, Ora was an ex-senator who had destroyed the Wall Street millionaires, another ex-senator who had wiped out the Reds, a Russo-Polish-Spanish-Iowa actress who had three kings as lovers, a forger who had done twenty years in the pen, a chess champion, and a Hollywood dog.

Ghosting paid better than the composition of begging letters, but he never gave them up, for no sacrifice was too great for his art. And it was as an artist, as a seer, that he was able, he crowed, to put it all over Myron.

Ora had been thinking about a new realistic novel in which he would crucify a horrible parent named Tim Wiggins, who kept a foul restaurant and was beastly to his sensitive son, and possibly in connection with this enterprise he had run up to Black Thread Centre for a week.

Returned, he charged in on Myron.

'Well, the great innkeeper and psychologist, that can tell a crook before he's signed the register, has certainly pulled one swell boner!' said Ora, winking at Myron's pretty typist.

Myron hastily sent her out, and stormed, 'What the devil do you mean now?'

'I've been up to the Centre, and I saw Dad and Mom, and since you were so kind as to rescue them from working and give them a nice easy old age, in their lovely little bungalow among the roses--well, they're simply going nuts with nothing to do, that's all!'