Chapter I

Farrington read the note three times, fished the discarded envelope out of his wastepaper basket, scrutinized it thoroughly, and then addressed himself again to the neat vertical script. What he read was this:

If Mr. Farrington will appear at the Sorona Tea House, on Bayfield
Road, near Corydon, at four o’clock today--Tuesday--the matter
referred to in his reply to our advertisement may be discussed.
We serve only one client at a time and our consultations are all
strictly confidential.

The note was unsigned, and the paper, the taste and quality of which were beyond criticism, bore no address. The envelope had not passed through the post office, but had been thrust by a private messenger into the R.F.D. box at Farrington’s gate.

Laurance Farrington had been established in the Berkshires for a year, and his house in the hills back of Corydon, with the Housatonic tumbling through his meadow, had been much described in newspapers and literary journals as the ideal home for a bachelor author. He had remodeled an old farmhouse to conform to his ideas of comfort, and incidentally he maintained a riding horse, a touring car and a runabout; and he had lately set up an Airedale kennel.

He was commonly spoken of as one of the most successful and prosperous of American novelists. He not only satisfied the popular taste but he was on cordial terms with the critics. He was thirty-one, and since the publication of The Fate of Catherine Gaylord, in his twenty-fourth year, he had produced five other novels and a score or more of short stories of originality and power.

An enviable man was Laurance Farrington. When he went back to college for commencement he shared attention with presidents and ex-presidents; and governors of states were not cheered more lustily. He was considered a very eligible young man and he had not lacked opportunities to marry. His friends marveled that, with all his writing of love and marriage, he had never, so far as any one knew, been in love or anywhere near it.

As Farrington read his note in the quiet of his study on this particular morning it was evident that his good fortune had not brought him happiness. For the first time he was finding it difficult to write. He had begun a novel that he believed would prove to be the best thing he had done; but for three months he had been staring at blank paper. The plot he had relied on proved, the moment he began to fit its parts together, to be absurdly weak; and his characters had deteriorated into feeble, spineless creatures over whom he had no control. It was inconceivable that the mechanism of the imagination would suddenly cease to work, or that the gift of expression would pass from him without warning; and yet this had apparently happened.

Reading somewhere that Sir Walter Scott had found horseback riding stimulating to the imagination, he galloped madly every afternoon, only to return tired and idealess; and the invitations of his neighbors to teas and dinners had been curtly refused or ignored. It was then that he saw in a literary journal this advertisement:

PLOTS SUPPLIED. Authors in need of assistance served with discretion.
Address X Y Z, care of office, _The Quill_.

To put himself in a class of amateurs requiring help was absurd, but the advertisement piqued his curiosity. Baker, the editor of The Quill, wrote him just then to ask for an article on Tendencies in American Fiction; and in declining this commission Farrington subjoined a facetious inquiry as to the advertisement of X Y Z. In replying, Baker said that copy for the ad had been left at the business office by a stranger. A formal note accompanying it stated that a messenger would call later for answers.

“Of course,” the editor added jocularly, “this is only another scheme for extracting money from fledgling inkslingers--the struggling geniuses of Peoria and Ypsilanti. You’re a lucky dog to be able to sit on Olympus and look down at them.”

Farrington forced his unwilling pen to its task for another week, hoping to compel the stubborn fountains to break loose with their old abundance. His critical faculties were malevolently alert and keen, now that his creative sense languished. He hated what he wrote and cursed himself because he could do no better.

To add to his torture, the advertisement in The Quill recurred to him persistently, until, in sheer frenzy, he framed a note to X Y Z--an adroit feeler, which he hoped would save his face in case the advertisement had not been put forth in good faith.

Plots--he wrote--were the best thing he did; and as X Y Z seemed to be interested in the subject it might be amusing if not indeed profitable for them to meet and confer. This was the cheapest bravado; he had not had a decent idea of any sort for a year!