For twenty long years, Ben Ross has gone about his routine of paying his landlord $10 for a dilapidated studio apartment, eating smoked fish from a sketchbox, and paying $2.50 to send a painting to the Artists’ Express Company in the hopes they will sell it. Each year, the company rejects him. After Ben tells a friend this, the friend attempts to console him, assuring him his luck will turn. Ben declares he does not believe in luck, but his friend knows this to be untrue. Ben is tired of his impoverished lifestyle, disgusted with the frequent sentiment that many artists become famous after they die. To prove he knows luck does not exist, he tells his friend a “joke”. Last year, Ben was unable to afford the fee for the Artists’ Express Company and, deciding to cast their opinions of his work aside, did not submit a painting. Unfortunately, the train containing all the paintings headed for the company derailed and crashed. Every artist was compensated for their work. Ben tells his friend that the famous painter Robert Henri used to encourage his students to disregard luck and simply create, then goes on a tirade about the men he once studied with who somehow managed to reach the Metropolitan Museum of Art despite their lower quality of work. He says Henri, while not the best painter, made aspiring artists feel seen and worthy of attention. He asserts that is how an artist should feel. Now, Ben’s main income stems from copying his peers’ work hanging in the Metropolitan and selling them to an interior designer.  Although he listens to Ben’s objections to luck, his friend knows Ben secretly believes his glory will come. He can see it in the way Ben continues purchasing the more expensive, higher quality paints because they will not degrade through the years. Due to watching Ben struggle for so long, he claims Ben’s crime is not necessarily a guilty one. After speaking with his friend, Ben conceives of a plan to hang his art in the Metropolitan. He varnishes an old study of apples, then wraps it in a cloth and takes it with him to the museum during his copying work. In the copying room, Ben waits for the guard to leave and quickly hangs his painting. With the $5 he earns from the copy painting, he buys food for a party, telling his friends he now hangs in the Metropolitan. His friends are all excited for him, and while he tells them he does not believe in luck, he is thrilled with himself and forgets his two decades of poverty. At night, he argues with himself that rich men are allowed to donate to the Metropolitan and that his actions do not constitute a crime like stealing a painting would. He falls asleep in the lap of the goddess Fame, but his friend regards Fame as a fickle woman who takes on new companions just as quickly as she drops old ones. The next day, Ben returns to the Metropolitan to continue his copying work, but finds his painting has been removed. Rejected once more, Ben says he does not believe in luck.