"
Ten minutes later Elfrida was laughing at their ambitions.
"A success?" she exclaimed. "Oh yes! I mean to have a
success--one day! But not yet--oh no! First I must learn
to write a line decently, then a paragraph, then a page.
I must wait, oh, a very long time--ten years perhaps.
Five, anyway."
"Oh, if you do that," protested Golightly Ticke, "it will
be like decanted champagne. A success at nineteen--"
"Twenty-one," corrected Elfrida.
"Twenty-one if you like--is a sparkling success. A
success at thirty-one is--well, it lacks the accompaniments."
"You are a great deal too exacting, Miss Bell," Rattray
put in; "those things you do for us are charming, you
know they are."
"You are very good to say so. I'm afraid they're only
frivolous scraps."
"My opinion is this," Rattray went on sturdily. "You
only want material. Nobody can make bricks without
straw--to sell--and very few people can evolve books out
of the air that any publisher will look at it. You get
material for your scraps, and you treat it unconventionally,
so the scraps supply a demand. It's a demand that's
increasing every day--for fresh, unconventional matter.
Your ability to treat the scraps proves your ability to
do more sustained work if you could find it.
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