Please let me have it, with a few verbal
corrections, ready for the press when I come home at the end of
September. It will bring you in about ?15."
Allen was modestly elated, and only wished he had gone to one of the
periodicals more widely circulated. It was plain that literature was
his vocation, and he was going to write a novel to be published in a
serial, the instalments paying his expenses for the trial. The only
doubt was what it should be about, whether a sporting tale of modern
life, or a historical story in which his familiarity with Italian art
and scenery would be available. Jock advised the former, Armine
inclined to the latter, for each had tried his hand in his own
particular line in the "Traveller's Joy," and wanted to see his germ
developed.
To write in the heat and glare of London was, however, manifestly
impossible in Allen's eyes, and he must recruit himself by a yachting
expedition to which an old acquaintance had invited him half
compassionately. Jock shrugged his shoulders on hearing of it, and
observed that a tuft always expected to be paid in service, if in no
other way, and he doubted Allen's liking it, but that was his affair.
Jock himself with his usual facility of making friends, had picked up
a big north-country student, twice as large as himself, with whom he
meant to walk through the scenery of Derbyshire and Yorkshire, as far
as the modest sum they allowed themselves would permit, after which
he was to make a brief stay in his friend's paternal Cumberland farm.
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