He folded the stamps in with his manuscript, dropped it into the letter-box, and from three weeks to a month afterward the postman came up the steps and handed him the manuscript.

Surely there were no live, warm editors at the other end.

It was all wheels and cogs and oil-cups--a clever mechanism operated by automatons.

He reached stages of despair wherein he doubted if editors existed at all.

He had never received a sign of the existence of one, and from absence of judgment in rejecting all he wrote it seemed plausible that editors were myths, manufactured and maintained by office boys, typesetters, and pressmen.
The hours he spent with Ruth were the only happy ones he had, and they were not all happy.