The balance; a novel

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1917 Excerpt: ...ruin your reputation for writing saleable stuff. The 'Lady in the Lion Skin' is saleable. If you feel you can't make money from such stuff you better go fight in somebody's foreign legion, or work in an office for twenty-five a week. But don't write plays!" "I guess I'm not quite ready for the foreign legion yet, thank you," he answers. "I'll write for a while. Perhaps this thing won't last for long, Sydney, anyway," she says, at the door. "Meanwhile, come and see me, and I'll cheer you up!" Sammy is quite sure it will last, however, as he takes his departure from the apartment, and strolls down Fifth Avenue. As he walks he gazes curiously at the names upon the brass plates by the entrances, the names upon the windows, and over the doors, A beautiful marble street, this lower Fifth Avenue, beautiful buildings, beautiful offices. How attractive our modern commercial world seems in the romance of these triumphs of architecture! And yet, are they, too, like his play? Behind their artistic fronts does something horrible lurk? Great smelters in far-off Montana, with half-naked workmen sweating beneath travelling cranes, in their ears the crash of levers and machinery, the hiss and swirl of molten metal punctuated by loud detonations as the steam bubbles in the great pouring pots explode with frightful showers of white, burning, blinding metal sparks! Outside, the blue and yellow flats, edged by the desolate sage-brush hills, the distance blurring the wretched shacks of the town, rendering indistinct the foreign names upon the saloons and lunch-rooms, leaving plain and distinct in all the squalor only the huge company-owned store, and the company-owned hotel, where visitors of the owners may be entertained, until they start thei...