Monday;

Yesterday was a day so extraordinary, so uncommon even in the life
of a star reporter, that when I sit down here at the typewriter to tell
about it, I am overcome by the slowness of the slow and inexpressive
types, and am going to save it all to tell you by word of mouth. It
centres in the Adventure of the Fair Cuban which you may have seen on the
front page of Sunday's Sun. It is, as anyone who reads may see, some
kind of an extraordinary delusion or pipe dream. Yet it was so wonderful
in its consistency that I am convinced that she believes it herself and
am sure that she is under an extraordinary delusion. But my hypothesis
as to its cause is a suggestive thing. She is without doubt an octoroon,
and has lived in the South where that blood is a reproach. I think that
she has made up this delusion in order to make herself believe that she
does not carry negro blood, and that her husband, a refined and well worth
while Englishman who free lances for the magazines, is aiding and abetting
her in it.

But it was much more wonderful than that, owing to the detail and the
points of the story which I could not tell in the Sun; and I am going
to have a great tale for your hearing.

And so to work again; for my assignment is cut out for me and I may not
be able to write again today.

I wrote you a note on hotel paper yesterday saying that I'd be in Cambridge, you and God willing, on April 11 at 12.

Tell Rufus that I couldn't find Willur today and will try him tomorrow.

Any more diamond questions?

Monday night;

A loafing day, after a driving one. I have done little but drift about on a perfectly dead story about the law admitting Sunday concerts to the boards, whose only good was that it afforded me a chance to advertise Billy Erb, who appeared for the showmen. Dined at the club, and there rather enjoyed a chin with one Thomas of the Times, one of the salt of the earth that exists in newspaper offices to offset the scum. Austin Strong was there, too; an Austin greatly changed and improved from the Cooky little cub whom I interviewed once in Frank's house in San Francisco. I am finding the club a little more pleasant, but it is not the Bohemian. My mind went back to the half hour before dinner in the bar of the Bohemian; how I drifted in there every day after work and had an ambrosial session with many and many a one who talked with the golden tongue of the West.

Thomas and I were trading reminiscences of Boss Clarke (at this very moment Boss looks over my shoulder to throw a remark at the man opposite me; this is not a visible machine, however) and of one Bowers, who used to be the City Editor of the Tribune. This man Bowers had a memory like Clarke's, but his ran more to localities; and of it wonderful things are spoken. He had a way of lining up the whole staff when he had assignments to give out, and of roasting them one by one, to the great, secret joy of everyone except the man who was getting roasted. One day, he said to a man named Barrett:

"Sir, your intellect is admirably adapted to the conduct of an infintesimally small peanut stand in an incredibly remote suburb!"

Managing Editor

Van Anden of the Times has sent to me a guarded note saying that he wants to see me in a hurry; so tonight I have a clandestine meeting with him. There is some switch in the situation, and I imagine that he is going to demand a showdown. I telephoned to Rob McClure, who says that the other thing is going all right, and I suppose that I'll be out of suspense and have a line on my future within a few days.

if they figured at all, that I was simply playing the professor
game. I sat for some time, and presently they began to drift
toward me. A man who looked like a plain hobo sat down at my
table. I threw him a careless remark, and he, in the seclusion
of his own club, began talking. I led him on by easy stages. I
could see, after a time, that he was curious about my trade,
so I managed here and there to let a word drop about the horses;
and from what he said afterward I found that he had taken it for
granted that I was a racetrack "tout." He lifted up his voice
and talked of many things He liked Chicago and Denver. They were
the widest open towns he ever saw in his life. Frisco was pretty
good, and Cincinnati was grand. Everything was wide open if you
knew where to look. But Philly was slow town for sure and
Boston was no good. We were joined after a time by a little
scrubbed lad not more than eighteen. I liked him. He was
sure in the business for adventure, and he was interested in
everything that the elder yegg man (I'm pretty sure that yegging
was his lay) had to tell him. The elder yegg grew eloquent
over the way they trat a man who gets arrested in Alabama.
He made the kid shudder by his tales of the thongs with
which they beat you until you bleed -- "and then rub salt and
pepper in the holes" -- He told about the trials of a man
with the Texas Rangers on the border. All that time, he
said not a word about his own lay. It is etiquette, I believe,
neither to mention your own game nor to ask anyone to mention
his.

A girl who interested me sat down at the table with us.
Not all the women in this revel were regular beggars and thieves.
Many of them, I saw it, were the hard-faced, dirty, broken-
down prostitute of the Bowery. But this girl, although homely
enough, was not hard of face. She had just a rudiment of a nose,

which tilted so that it showed the upper lip. She had a bit of a
scrubbed, ill-nourished figure. Here best point were two
large and rather appealing eyes, which just escaped being pretty.
And for some reason, strange in that environment, she was shy.
I kept my eye on her, I bought her two drinks, I tried to lead
her into talk. She seemed rather to like my looks, but she
seemed to shy to talk. Only when the drinks came, she thanked
me rather prattly, considering. I had forgotten her for a time,
when I raised my eyes and saw that she had screwed her courage
up to try to talk back and engage me in conversation. She
almost blushed, as she screwed it out of herself:

"Me too, teet' is gittin' all loose, so's I've got to go
and git 'em fixed," she said. She was trying to make small
talk.

That is about all, except what I put in the paper. The
mutilation of Jim Forbes I did not see. That occurred the night
before -- for this was a two-day time.

And yesterday, the day of the new offer, and one, as I
told you, of great emotion, I spent mainly in New Jersey
freezing to death while I tried to round up the story of the
burglar who robbed a jail, and partly at a dull and highbrowed
performance of the Progressive Stage Society.

Which, since the City Editor wants me, is all for now.

Sunday

The California business, after all the fuss and feathers, is a fake. I bust ed it in five minutes after you left. It appears that the tip about American millionaires came from the London Mail, the yellow journal of those diggings. I found that she carried just 17 cabin passengers. Among them was one priest, and ther e were only three men besides him, so that they had to call on the ship's doctor when they wanted to get up a game of poker in the smoking room. It was as quiet and dull a winter trip as a liner ever took. If I had learned that, I could have ridden back with you in the hansom.

I think that I promised you the tale of the Literary Prostitute, the Ambitious Grocer, and The Samoan Consul. This is a story which just misses having a point/

I said something to you of Churchill. He is the revise proof reader on the Sun. You see, this newspaper of our standing has to have a learned man to go over the proofs and look out for all kinds of things, as mistakes in classical quotations and references, in law, in medical terms, in history, in a thousand and one things in which reporters may make mistakes of knowledge and which copy readers may let past them. Churchill has a grand fund of knowledge and of lore. His specialty is philology, and I believe that he writes on it. He is a master of arts from Yale.

He lived in San Francisco and did newspaper work there in the wild Middle Period of Big Becky. He was one of the founders of the Bohemian Club, and is full of the lore of the times, which he lines out to me with a gusto flavored with cynicism. Later, he went to Samoa as American consul. I am told that he fell in love with Isobel Strong so deeply that he went insane for a time. His wife brought him back to this country and put him in an asylum. When he was cured, he began at the bottom again as a proof reader. He knows, they say, a great deal of the back stairs history of the Stevensons.

Now in the time when he was a rounder in San Francisco, a drinker of many drinks and a cavaliere of unclean loves, there was a famous house of prostitution known as Carrie's. It stood on Post Street,

opposite the Hamam Baths where Admeh Drake fought with the tattooed man, and was distinguished, as were all houses of the kind in those days, by a low awning that drooped over the door. And in that house dwelt a most alluring lady of pleasure named Jeanette. She was born in Boston, and was said to come of a good family. There were stories about her of a wild romance and an elopment which led to her adopting that life. It used to be a fashion among ladies of her craft to say that they were "college girls" if they ever saw the inside of a high school, so that Churchill never believed all this until he himself fell under her spell and began to go to her a great deal. "She could put up an article of grand and lofty copulation which was quite good for a professional", he said to me. Then he rather liked her, for her mind as well as her body; and, being in a

society where such things were regular procedure, he used to trail about town with her a good deal, feeding her at the public restaurants and the like. She was a constant reader, with a taste for the classic poets. Sometimes, during a night session, after he had taken his fill, she used to sit up in bed with a shawl about her shoulders, after he had composed himself to sleep, and read red line editions of Milton and Spenser. At first he took it for affectation; but later he understood that she had a real liking for letters.

Often, they went walking of afternoons. And their course led them past a house where a girl sat at the windows and watched them.

He didn't say this; but I imagine that the girl marked him as blithe and bonny and fated to be her own.

Because in time he met the girl of the window and fell in love with her. They were married in the end. In the cleanup before marriage, he told her all about ××××××××× his affairs, even the girl with whom he used to promenade. She must have forgiven him, since she married him and stuck to him when he was insane over another

woman. So Jeanette dropped out of sight for him, and in time
he went to Samoa as Consul.

Now just before that time, there appeared in the socials of the
Red Men and the Patriotic Order Sons of America a grocer of Oakland
who was a friend on Prestidigitation and amateur magic. He became
bitten with the bug of ambition, gave up his grocery, practiced night
and day, and went on the vaudeville circuit. He never invaded the
East; but in the West he had a great reputation as Herman. The
South Seas allured him; and having a cheap, one man show, he did
the Pacific Circuit from Honolulu to Australia, paying all the Islands
Churchill had heard of his reputation, and a visitor of any reputation is welcomed in the outposts of the
Earth. So that when the steamer was anchored, having Harrington
aboard, Churchill and his wife went out to meet it. Mrs. Churchill
went first to greet the Harringtons, leaving her husband and all the rest
talking to the Captain. When he approached his wife, who was standing
with a lady and a loudly dressed gentleman, she said:

"My dear, let me present Mr. and Mrs. Harrington."

I suppose you saw it coming. The lady in the case was
Jeanette. She was Mrs. Harrington.

Churchill recognized her at once. He managed to catch his
breath and speak to her simply and naturally. So far as he knew,
he could make out, there was not the slightest recognition on her
part. She had not changed a bit, but Churchill had grown a beard.

He managed to call his wife aside.

"Do you know who that is, my dear? That is Jeanette, with
whom you used to seem walking. And you have already gone up and
introduced yourself. What are you going to do?"

"Do?" said Mrs. Churchill, "Why go right ahead with it.
If she has been all that, it would be terrible to expose her or
make her feel ill at ease away down here. She must have enough of
that at home. I'm going to invite her to luncheon!"

Which she did. The Harringtons were there three days. The
Churchills saw them every day at some meal or other. Mrs. Churchill
was charmed with Mrs. Harrington's evident breeding, and came to like

Monday Morning:

The office boy summoned me, and through the door walked Dick Hotaling. On my native heath, I have no manner of use for Hotaling, although recognizing that he is clever, in a dilletante, millionaire, spoiled boy kind of way. And for reasons that it profiteth not to go into, I am not popular with him. But here were four thousand miles from the City of Delights, and both sitting up nights hating environment. So I took him out and introduced him to the best drink in New York.

"It was invented," said I, "To celebrate the 2000 birthday of Julius Caesar."

"I suppose," said he, "That after you have had four of them you perform a Caesarian operation and cut it out." And so we drank. He was Meledon in my jinks; and he is the first man I have seen who was in the cast and can tell me of the times they had slinging it together. For that reason, I am to xxxxx lunch with him on Wednesday and hear all about it.

He is here promoting a railroad, which is going to run through the Napa Valley into the Lake country, a region of the earth which deserves all that was ever said of the Lake countries of England and Scotland -- and which will someday, in California, have its Burns and its Wordsworth.

I pause a moment to boast. I quote you statistics. You know that Who's Who in America is one sided in that it is weak on the side of leaders in business and the professions and strong on men of learning and the arts. Someone has just figured out the proportion of whosewhosers to 1000 of the population in each state. It is found that for the births of whosewhosers Massachusetts leads, with California just a fraction of a point behind and the rest nowhere. In present residence of whosewhosers, New York leads, of course, since that draws the talent of the country to make it mediocre. But here again California is a close second. I shall attract the attention of the California Promotion Committee to these facts.

You perceive that as I approach the position of Editor of a magazine the World's Affairs, I become statistical.

Tuesday Morning:

That incident of the other Virginian is simply bully -- and it took the one woman in thousands to carry it off as you did. The young man doesn't know it, but he has met with a unique experience. Nothing like that will ever happen to him again. If he is a gentleman, he will keep it still for years until he is out of any possibility of it being connected with you, and then tell it to his grand-daughters for their guidance in ladyhood -- after he outgrows some of the Southern point of view.

Today is a day of some suspense. For today sometime, the lawyer will give his verdict as to the clearness of the title; and if it is favorable, I step out into a new thing the strangeness of which awes me a little. There will be many a day of hesitation and many a night when I am sorry that I ever left the SUN, before it is as it should be. But there is a great ultimate chance in it.

Let me see, what did I do yesterday? Do you know, I often have to stop to ask myself that question. This variety has reached monotony; the events of the day have to be unusually strong and vital to make any impression. But it seems to me that in the afternoon I searched the East Side looking for a lawyer who could tell me about the woman who was in trouble because she cooked too well. In the evening, after rewriting the South American tale so as to cut it, I absorbed a small dinner of Boston pork and beans and went to Chinatown Charlie, the Opium Fiend, at the Thalia. About that time, Percy Donavan, the busted British poet, appeared on the scene. He wanted to tell me with joy in his tone that Leslie's had paid him ten dollars in advance for a set of rhymes to go with some pictures. I took him to dinner and to the show.

In our far-faring in New York we were unlucky in not seeing a regular East Side or Bowery audience on a first night. Far be it from me to describe it.

But I asked for box seats, thinking that we would be freer there and would have a better view of the audience. We were given an upper box. Our way took us through the audience, through a dark passage, up a crazy

flight of stairs, and out upon another dark passage -- so dark that you had to grope. And all of a sudden we were out on a wisp of a balcony with the packed audience stories below, and the stage so far to one side that you could look clear through the wings and see the actors make their exits and go to their dressing rooms in the half darkness of the between the scenes changes. There were five seats in the box; and two of them were occupied. We found to our sorrow that there was just room for three chairs in front, and that it was impossible to sit down and see anything except from those three front seats. One of the two people -- a girl and pretty in the first flash -- looked around. There was something like dismay in her face. She whispered something; and her companion moved over to make room. He did not look around, but kept his head bent toward the audience below. I took that third seat, leaving Donavan to stand up. When I was seated, I turned to my left, drawn by the strongest law of nature, to look at the girl. She was mucker, pretty, Germanic, rather expensively dressed after her Germanic style; but there was a curious flush of confusion over her. And then -- I caught her companion.

He was a large, middle-aged, fat, rather greasy Chinaman in American clothes. She was undoubtedly living with this Chinaman. Her master had taken her to the theatre for an outing, and they had bought this remote hole so as to escape attention. For on the borders of Chinatown a white woman who lives with a Chinese is as a white woman who would live with a negro in the South. Hence her confusion, and the embarrassment which she showed whenever I looked her way -- which was seldom, as I thought it unkind to seem to take a great deal of notice.

The Chinaman held his seat all right. I was a little amused to think that no truly Californian of the blood would have let him at Chinaman crowd his friend out of a front seat any more than a Southerner would have allowed it to a negro. But I am a little of a sentimentalist about the Chinese. Almost do I think that in some past existence the ego, equipped with a Chinese mind of devious ways instead of the straight Saxon mind which is mine, was a Chinese. So do I catch the thrills which memory brings me, as I watch their ceremonies and view their art, from

light was so wonderful in color, in composition, in lighting and in distances that I will have to crave your imagination, that works wonders, to feel it.

And this brings me again to one of my worries over myself (pardon me if I write on the Donavan method) Why is it that I love low life so madly and why is it that high life bores me so -- irritates me? I have done as much high life as low life in my time; and I swear that out of the pleasures of the rich, out of state functions, out of public banquets, clubs, aggregations of fair women, I have never had anything thrill me like that evening in the Thalia -- thrill me with a real sense of beauty like that picture of actors in the distance and with a real sense of the glory in life like the shade of an adventure in the woman that lives with a Chinaman. Where is the lack which makes me so one-sided. Has it anything to do with that Subtlety business?

I slept at Frank's hotel last night so that I might have breakfast with him. However, he had an engagement with the Queen, so we breakfasted there. I had a raging letter from Aunt Susie which I read him. It delighted him all over. He says that she is a true sulphite; and he adds that he thinks I have treated her shamefully. There may be something in that.

There! I have written you so long a section of the Log that I am going to mail it at once so as not to overburden the mails of the United States.

Wednesday.

This day has brought forth rather a disagreeable job.
You will probably see in the Sun of tomorrow morning some-
thing about their marriage, six weeks fater her husband's death,
of Mrs. Yerkes. Wilson Mizner, Californian soldier of
fortune, and as handsome and dashingly a scamp as ever
broke a maiden head, has carried her off and married her,
with all due rites of clergy -- her and her prostitute past,
her fifty years, and her eight or ten millions in cold cash.
It was disagreeable, first because the American beat us to it
this morning, so that I was following a cold, but
mainly because I know the Mizners slightly and some of
their friends very well; and as the fats are a great deal
worse than the publication of the straight story, I have had
to pry out of some people who know them some rather discreditable
things. Mizner was at that Annual Christmas dinner of Cosgrave's.
I saw him there for the first time, leaning against the wall
and talking to my brother; and marked him for as bright and
big and bonny a man as I ever saw. Such charm and such a
laugh! He has sold it deliberately.

Sam Adams comes into this story, in such a surprising
way as I shall tell you some time. There is a great yarn there.
But today, Sam told me this:

In the first place, it is about a certainty that Mizner
has been living with her for some time. She is a drunkard,
and a whirlwind for men -- any old man so long as he will
give her strong comfort of his body. Mizner looks like a
man who would be strong on that.

No last November Yerkes lay dying at the Waldorf Astoria,
unattended by his wife, from whom he was estranged. Sam had
some business which led him to the Yerkes house. What was the
business, I have forgotten, but you may guess it from the
business, it hagometh you met with.

business, it beseemeth not to ask now. It is enough to say
that it was not discreditable to Sam. Very much to the
contrary. At the door, he met Parker who has been Yerkes's
servant and valet for twenty years and was foolishly fond of
that saint and Gorgon and devil, his master. The old man
was crying.

"What's the matter?" asked Sam.

"Oh, Mr. Adams, they have asked me to take all Mr. Yerkes's things out of his room and put in Mr. Mizner's & things," he said -- "Mr. Mizner is coming here to live in his rooms -- and him not dead yet --" and the old man broke down and cried again.

You have missed the story of the Griggsby complication
in Yerkes's death, doubtless, because the Sun did not touch it.
It reflected on a young girl, who might very well be without
blame; and then the brother of Emilie Griggsby worked for the
Sun once, and we held it out on account of him. That, with
this, comes as near being a novel of_Vanity_ Fair as anything
that ever came under my reporter's nose.

I may add that the bride was carried to bed dead drunk
and that the bridegroom, with some of his boon companions,
did his celebrating elsewhere. Surely, grand doings.

Now this, lady fair and dear, is the tale of Mark
Hanna and Davenport.

As you say that you have not been a newspaper reader,
it is doubtful in my mind if you know of the Hanna cartoons
by Davenport, and their part in the history of the McKinley
times. You must know then that Davenport was and is a
cartoonist with a rather rotten style of drawing and shocking
perspective, but with something of the Swift genius of insult

in his ideas. He was the great Hearst cartoonist in the times
of the fight against McKinley, and never were two public
men so badgereed, so dragged through the mire and so insulted
as were Hanna and McKinley by Davenport. He made a figure of
Hanna which is historic in the history of American cartoons.
A gross, sensual and leering figure, dressed in a suit of loud
checks each bearing the dollar mark, and usually standing on
a skull, waving a scourge of scorpions over the laborer,
or laughing at the insolence of those who asked for freedom.
This went on for years.

Now personally, Davenport is a great, openhearted
Westerner, a friend and booncompanion with all sorts of
men. His genius for insult is in his eye and his fingers
and not his heart, and there is an eternal conflict there.
He broke with Hearst and ruined his career because he could
no longer bear to insult and drive men whom he liked and in
whom he believed — Roosevelt among others.

This, however, happened long before that time.

Mark Hanna had a daughter Ruth, a great, overgrown
girl, not exactly insane but certainly a little eccentric
and unbalanced. In the second McKinley campaign, the Democratic
managers made great posters of one or two of Davenport's
best cartoons and distributed them through the country on the
bill boards. One day, she was out riding with a groom in
Cleveland when she saw one of those pictures of her father
on a blank wall. The idea struck her that she would go to
New York and horsewhip this Davenport. She bought a little
ten cent rawhide, sent the groom home to get her some money,
and, without changing her riding habit, took a train
for New York. She arrived in New York late in the afternoon.
She had not gone to bed at all. She arrived at the Journal

office soiled, tired, her hair about her face, and still
wearing the riding habit. She sent in her card to Davenport.
He answered it.

Now when Davenport saw that figure sitting there, a
whip across the knees, he caught the situation.

"I am not Mr. Davenport," he said. "I am his secretary. What
do you want with him."

"I am Ruth Hanna. I have come here to horsewhip him
for insulting my father." she said.

"Have you brought a good whip?" he asked. "Davenport is
a strong man."

She held out the whip. He took it in his hand and
examined it.

"A pretty good whip," he said and put it behind his
back.

"And now that I've got the whip," he said, "let me tell
you that I am Homer Davenport. Now listen to me, and then whip
me if you want to. There is nothing in the world that I would

rather have you do than horsewhip me. It would give me
the Democratic cause the greatest advertising and it would
hurt your father a great deal and of course I want to hurt him
a great deal. There is only one thing wrong with your plan.
This place is too public. I'd rather you did it in some place
like the lobby of the Waldorf.

"But I can't take this advantage of your father. It
would not be fighting fair. Now I'll tell you what you
do. You and I will go up to your father's office, see him
alone, and ask him about it. If he thinks that you ought to do
it, nothing will give me greater pleasure. Is that fair?"

"Certainly it's fair," she said. He ran for a cab,
and they drove straight to her father's office. Davenport
sent in his card. Hanna sent back word that he didn't want to

see Davenport. Davenport sent back word that it was a personal
affair, tht he came to do Hanna a service quite apart from
politics. "Show him in," came back the word. And Davenport
marched in with the young lady, whom he handed over to her
father.

After that, Hanna simply sought Davenport out.

"Go ahead, lampoon me all you like, you've earned it and
it might as well be a good job," he said. "I never did care
much, except for the one where you've got me on the skull
of a laboring man," he said. They used to lunch together
on the quiet. In his later years, Hanna showed a disposition
to take up the labor problem with some sincerity. They say
it was Davenport, something of a Socialist himself, who put
the idea into his head. And to the end of his days Hanna
never stopped thanking Davenport for his aid in preventing a
scene which, if it had happened, would have been howled from
one end of the county to the other by the Hearst papers.

Sunday:

I attended the dinner of the Amen Corner last night. The Amen Corner is composed mainly of political writers for the newspapers, and it is their custom to get together every year for a dinner, to which they invite all the politicians that they can gather in. It is a poor imitation of the Gridiron Club in Washington. They try to make it bright and clever and full of "stunts." But the political writer is not noted for his sense of humor, and the stunts are frightfully strained. Last year, I had there one of the big fights of my newspaper career. One has always to dine with them or they feel insulted; and sitting through a formal banquet is one of the most uncomfortable things I know. So that I didn't enjoy it. Besides, what with taking notes on the proceedings, I got little to eat and an uncomfortable amount to drink. And when I was through, at two o'clock in the morning, I was hungry, so I went down on the Bowery and devoured sandwiches complicated with beer. For that abuse of the human system, I pay this morning's bill with a sick headache.

Nothing, not even *xxx.xxx* falling hair, lines in the face and the loss of the sparkling nervous control of my body convinces me so much of the passing from youth as the effect that drink has on me of late. Once, if I became moved by liquor I became a cavaliere, a railer at the moon, a lover of adventure. I wanted to sing, if the company was joyous, and to talk a great deal of poetic foolishness. Now, the first effect of liquor is not unlike that first delicious effect of a glass of champagne which you have described to me. The world grows rosy; and I want to draw into my shell and dream. Last night, after two or three glasses, I found myself bored by everyone about me. They were pleasant

fellows enough; given a strictly sober state of mind, and
I would have liked to talk to them, but then I wanted to
dream. I rather welcome this, as I welcome anything that
makes me more a thinker and less a talker. My great tr-double,
as one who would like to write, is that my mental forces, such
as they are, tend to be metabolic rather than Katabolic. They
tend to throw out their humors at once instead of storing
them within to ripen.

I may add, changing the subject abruptly, that the
third act of the comedy of Sadi is going to be played on
Tuesday. I shall not be there to see it. She is going to
Philadelphia; and Hallie is going with her for a day. It is
something of an adventure, and I have a little apprehension
in letting a person so indiscreet as Hallie mix in so dark
an intrigue. As I have said, I shall have a great tale to
tell you ! Also by the way, your regulations are received,
and they will be obeyed to the letter. What is the best form
of insult to use toward women? I shall expect your help
and guidance in the matter. I shall also send you clippings
of all newspaper notices I get. I am having a special set
of photographs printed for the newspapers, for I intend to
glory in my public shame.

Last week, I wnt to "The Little Gray Lady" a play
written and just newl<sup>ay</sup> staged by a friend of mine, Channing
Pollock. At the door, while sneaking for a cigarette, I
met John Barry. He has been in town for two or three
months, and expects a winter here. As usual, his poise and
finish of manner threw me into some confusion, so tht I left
him with the feeling that I had made a dozen breaks. He
remarked a thing which I had noticed with a jump, that Julia
Dean, the leading lady, bears a remote resemblance of manner
to you. I may add that Julia Dean, although only a far
actress, is one of the most charming women of the stage.

You can put this down as straight. She hasn't the least bit of physical charm for him. How do I know? I'll tell you.

I have never met a man in my life who was so near like me psychologically as this same J. J. C. How an Anglo-Saxon and a Celt approach so near beats me. It is largely, perhaps, a matter of early training. And the later training, when all is said and done, is not so different from that. There are differences, of course, but at the bottom, there is a great resemblance. He has more intelligence than I, although what I have is better developed along my own lines; and I am better developed emotionally. But I realize that in any given situation he and I would act very much alike. (I say this after 3 meetings, perceive - but Corbett I have known second hand for ten years)

Now for me, Sadi hasn't the least bit of physical charm or of suggestion. An affair with her would bore me to death, and even the actual physical fulfilment would be cold. She hasn't any real physical attraction for me. I admire her eyes, the picquancy of her face, and the grace of her movement; but after all it is the admiration that I give to a child. There is nothing of sex in it. She says herself that there is a sexual suggestion of the body and another of the mind and that she is weak in the bodily suggestion and strong in the mental one --- that by that attraction of the mind she charms. And that is all very well for anyone whose mind gibes with hers; but to one who is jarred by every expression of hers, she has certainly no sexual charm of the mind. Now I am very certain that he feels the same thing and is continually repelled as I am by her, while at the same time he keeps up the game for the good it will do him to know a real lady, and for the salve to his conceit. And now, he is amused by the comedy. He is having all kinds of fun watching her maneuvres, which ever grow more obvious as she grows more desperate over this man whom she cannot charm. Rather curious, the contrast of her two failures!

To put it shortly, she has no real charm in the sexual sense for either Corbett or me. And because he has had to training of the eye to see any beauty that does not thrust itself out at him in pink cheeks.

round breasts, and satin skin, she has no beauty to him. I am perfect
ly sure that if I suggested to him that she has beauty, he would laugh
inside, whatever his courtesy prompted to him to say outside.

She doesn't sourse either of us any.

Hallie will hit Boston about the twelfth of February.
She has to travel by schedule, as she has three visits
to pay on the way back. She has to see her old friend in
Boston also. It is her present plan, as she has doped it
up, to appear at you house on about the morning of the 14th
for luncheon, and stay until the following night, when she will
take train for the West. I cannot come at that time --
that is almost a cinch. Since the Sun raised me, it has
been dictatorial about my services, and I cannot get days
off as I could once.

However, when the spring breaks again, as it did last
year, I may need a rest, and may be able to plan two days
off in a bunch. I shall then be open to the Most Attractive
Invitation I get for spending two days out of town. I shouldn't
wonder if I should find at that time that Cambridge is the
best place to rest in -- provided I am invited. You see, I
am without sense of shame.

"Rolling a drunk" means robbing a drunken man. "Rolling
his fares" means robbing a drunken passenger -- a dear
sin with nighthawk cabmen.

Friday, Aug 31, 1936.

An it please ye, lady, I have been passing sick with three things. I would have been in bed had it not been that Miss Cather is sick up the country and will be back goodness knows when. I have tonsilitis in the holes, with all the disagreeable languor that goes with tonsilitis; also I have neuralgia in the eyes and a rare disease of the gums akin to tonsilitis and for which the dentist is shooting stuff into my mouth every morning. All this has convinced me that my system is in a very bad way and that I've got to do something radical with myself. I have been sleeping all the hours when I was not in the office.

I beg you do not blame me because I haven't written any log this week — although I have had several things of interest to tell you. One of them is that the Times sent an emissary day before yesterday to tell me that if I would come up there as Sunday Editor I could name my own terms. Of course I refused; but I found out afterward that they were willing to pay me as high as a thousand dollars a month. That is a great deal more money than I should know what to do with.

Frank has arrived and got busy. I think now that he and Lindsey Denison will get along a great deal better than anyone believed — although I don't know how he will get on with L. D. plus Mrs. L. D. She is sure and certain a cat. A letter from Maysie at last — nothing in it, but friendly.

I have sent to Cromwell, as you asked, a copy of the city that was, together with a bit of a education.

I have a lot of extra copies now, and shall save several of them out for future demands. If you have anyone else to whom you'd like copies sent, let me know. It has already sold nearly 1500, and the sale is increasing. Huebsoh is now ahead of his

Sweet Santa Ynez;

Yesterday, I being still very weak on the pins, J Cosgrave came in upon me and carried me by force to Sea Gate and the Atlantic Yacht Club, where I am going to live for ten days, coming back and forth on the boat, so that I may get some of the roses backin my cheeks. This rose process is a little premature, consisting as it does of being a convalescent before I am cured. But I am a great deal better on the whole, and this morning I ate a steak -- the first solid food I have negotiated for ten days or since I got back from Canandaigua. But I still have a bad mouth and throat -- both doctor and dentist call it a stubborn case. It seems that I am pretty well impregnated with the pioson of this here East.

With us there came down last night David Graham Philipps and his sister Mrs. Frevert. I wish to goodness that I were as sure of fame, fortune and love in this world and a bright immortality in the next as David Graham Philipps is of everything. I have never known a man to whom everything is such a cinched certainty. His is Sir Oracle -- but he talks well and I am fain to listen. He deals mostly with the fate of the republic, the purity of Hearst, the otteness of everything and suck like tppics. It is rather good fun, though there

are things which interest me more than the salvation of the Great Republic. His sister is of the conventional New York type; and we touched only on the theatres and theatrical stars. As I get a little better

and able to talk about, I am going to like Sae Gate and the
Yacht Club. It is near Coney Island -- we passed it on the last turn the
Dreamland Boat took before it reached the Dreamland pier. Perhaps
you remember the building with the great, classic pillars, where,
I told you, I once saw a minstrel show. There is the dim dream city
in the distance, and the little lights along the horizon all about.
Best of all, you sleep under two blankets, for the dead air is
brisk. After a day or two, when I am able to walk about some, I am
going to like it I know.

I am staying in the city tonight. Mr. and Mrs. Bert Hoover, she
a classmate and he a Chinese mining promoter, (or rather a mining
promotor in China. He is always known as "Stanford's most successful
graduate." He will be away again for years, so when they invited me
to dinner at the Astor I accepted. I'm hardly fit for it, but I
shall break away and go to bed as soon as may be.

The package from Philadelphia arrived yesterday. It was
satisfactory -- all that could be wished and strictly as advertised.
Thank you, beloved madame. I have been eating up the account of the
yacht club. How I should have liked to be there and see the Dutchmen
sawed under Willie's motto: To Helle with the Dutch!

The Queen has come back, so that it is time for me to be a-moving.
My removal to the Atlantic was well timed. I can't seem to get a great
deal better; this thing is nore than two weeks old now and still r ages
unchecked. The doctor I had and who took out the tonsils has gone out
of town; and the new one tells me that a great deal remains to be done
with th knife. The tonsils are out; but this throat is so malignant
that a great deal of the surrounding tissue must be cut and scraped
away -- "and I must take a rest." That last I have heard from doctors
these seven years dnce I left college; and my answer is:"I hire you
to take the place of a rest!"

I handed the Bubble of aDreams over to Jack Cosgrave, and he
handed it back today with the remark:

"Don't want it; verypoor; why didn't you keep on collaborating with
Burgess?" So, I take it, I am no writer, and I reckon what les
autres about McClure's have said is true.

Cosgrave is, as ever, big, calm, good, reliable. It is now a
lucky waman who is married to him; but he is not lucky in his marriage
unless it be xxxt in that she is likely to die of tuberculosis in
the next yea r. For I have a new light on that woman, which I shall
shed for you some day. Hd and Lindsay were both stung, I think.

I am in the flat for a Saturday afternoon before taking the boat
over Sunday to the yacht club. I must now roll in and get a little of
the sleep which is the toll that a bad throat demands.

Sime time ebefore the first of October, at which time S. S. comes back
from abroad, I must go to Boston, or rather to Cambridge, to see the
head of the eepartment of economics at Harvard; also to Concord N. H.
to try for a glimpse of Mrs. Eddy. I'd like to see you, of cou rse, in
those times; but it might be that I would chose a time when you are in
pricess of moving. Wherefore, O lady, wilt thou te ll me when thou
movest?

Yours Blirwin.

At the office Monday morning.

I received this somewhat oh eering letter this morning apropos the
Bubble of dreams and hasten to send it on to you. Perhaps the
American people take it just because I am editing the rival
sheet, but at any rate it will get into print, and you know that
The Bubble is an omen.

Charles and I saw Salem, making much moan because you couldn't
be with us. With Charles, who is seldom enthusiastic over any
woman, you made a great hit. He asked me why I didn't mention
your personal charms along with your mental altitude. "She is
awfully pretty," he said. We tooled through the town with the
same old driver who drove you and me. It appears that the
episode of the Salem witchcraft has always appealed to his imag-
ination, and he let it play all through the trip. When we got to
Boston, we found that there had been a mistake about dining with
Mr. Flood. He had expected Charlie to telephone, and Charlie had
regarded it as a fixed engagement. In consequence, Flood had lit
out and we dined alone at the Thorndike.

Then a walk through Boston Common, both of us agreeing that
we would rather live in Boston than anywhere outside of San
Francisco -- and then the sleeper.

I wonder if you have realized in full the romance of having yo
your great park with swan boats and all that kind of thing, jam
up to the business end of the city? It impressed me powerfully.

Don't forget to give me your Boston address. Of course, I
have forgotten it. Also tell me whether I am to address Boston
Brookline.

as ever Blirwin.

Wednesday mining.

The last two days have brought forth two forced dinners and theatre parties — in both cases I would rather have gone to bed. In the first instance of writing, Avirette the Poet of the Mining Profession, paid his social debt by taking Jack Cosgrave and me to dinner at the Yale Club and to Henry Arthur Jones' Hypoorites afterward. The play is fair, a great satire on British respectability, and more frank in regard to matters between the sexes than anything I have seen except Mrs. Warren's Profession. Avirette was not quite himself, and dropped but few gems. One was as follows:

Gerge Schroeder, a mining engineer with whom he trails, is being pursued by process servers. Avirette undertook to get him over to New Jersey.

"He said to me, 'got the little gun?' and I said, 'always with me.' Then I walked out to tend to Mr. Server. 'See here,' said I. 'Your house is on fire. Where do you live? You couldn't see him for heel dust.'"

The next evening, it was to the Girl from the Golden West with Charlie Field. I expected to be made to weep in spite of my better nature. Not a sob did I draw. It fell rather flat and cold on me, although I find that Blanche Bates has been developed from the great, big, good natured girl whom we used to know in the West, to a real actress - Blanche the schoolmaster I suppose.

Wednesday evening, at Isabel's, packing my things.

I have at last got around to moving. These are wild and lively
times for me. In the first place, we have struck a new and important
lead on our Christian Science friends. From a line in a little theo-
logical book published in New York, we open it up that Mrs. Eddy was
profoundly under the influence of the Shakers, and that a whole lot of
her philosophy and her stock phrases came from a wild Shaker book
published in the forties. This is so well hidden that I't has never
been brought out before, and yet it is of great importance. v Now, I
am starting Mollie Best and Hendrick for New England to work the
bonanza for all that it will assay.

In the meantime, I have struck a snag in the McClure shop which
is going to lead to a wild fight. Next Monday or Tuesday, on one
of which days the Chief is coming home, I am going to fight it out with
him with my resignation on the table between us. Perhaps it will be

interesting to you as knowing what may come any time during this
transition period in the taming of a genius.

There are certain trustees of the stock of the S. S. McClure
company, and they, assisted by us all, are trying to straighten out the
business affairs of the firm. chief among them is Doubleday of Double-
day Page and Company, the man who is holding with us the paresis
club meetings. Then there is Josiah Bennett of Boston, a boyhood friend
and the man who can furnish the sinews of war. As I have told you,
early in his trip abroad S. S. go't ready to buy the memoirs of Ellen
Terry, a manuscropt which we need as much as a do needs two tails and
for which we would have had to kdy pay an absurd price. We were all
against it. I cabled to France telling him so. Doubleday said that it
was a foolishness; and Bennett, sitting in my office, s id the same
thing and said it strongly. He advised me to cable that the trustees
were against it. I ought to have known better, but I did it. Letters
began to come back from him yesterday -- wild letters to Miss Cather,
Mrs. McClure, and Doubleday. He asked if he had any independence. He

wanted to know if there was anyone in the world whom he could trust.
He said that he hadn't spent for three nights and that he was coming
back to clean out the whole bunch of trustees and take control of his
own magazine. A rapid fire session between Doubleday and me developed
the plain policy. It wouldn't do for the trustees to be queered just
now; on them depends the getting out of that business. It devolves upon
me, the employee, to take all the blame. So I must meet him with a smile
when he comes back with this, his hardest mad in many years, and today,
or to suggest, that I lied. This I shall do with considerable aggress-
iveness and with my resignation on the table as aforesaid. For a
month or so, it will overthrow the confidence that I have built up in
him; but I shall be surprised if he takes my resignation. Miss
Roseboro' says that his grouch on me will be complicated further by
the fact that I sold the Bubble of Dreams to the American. He doesn't
want it himself, but the fact that it goes to the rival, so hatee, he will
consider a treason. This afternoon, I had an hour with Mrs. McClure --
a strange session. It was my official slap on the wrist for bothering
his nerves so. She dropped, also, this gem: "You know, after all, the

important thing is not so much making the magazine pay or making it
successful, as making Mr. McClure well and keeping him happy. That should
be the main end of us all! " Thatin so doing I make myself not an
editor but a kind of confidential valet doesn't occur to her -- the
eternal and pernicious McClure intimacy. Further, she came into the
office this morning and found that S. S. had given Miss Bray permission
to use a certain mahogany desk in the private office which S. S. had
put there for her(Mrs. McC.) She therefore warned me against Miss
Bray.

"My daughters, you know, watched here that evening when you all went
to Coney Island. They found her very bold and forward. She is certainly
not a lady. I heard my husband advising her to wear bright clothes about
the office. There was a nurse once who worked him for silk dresses and
diamonds. I feel certain that this Miss Bray is of that type." Isn't
that a corker? Poor Mary Louise Bray, who is our comfort and joy for
the way she bears everyone's burdens, does everyone's work, listens to
everyone's troubles, and has made herself indispensable in three months.

It approaches the bromidical situation of the wife and the pretty type-
writer.

There was a great dael more than this, and in most of it Mrs.
McClure shone in a better light -- the fond wife, sorrowing because he
is drawing away from her, and anxious for everyt hing that goes to the
health of her beloved. I am not the only one that is afflicted. This
morning, she wept on the shoulder of Miss Bray because her husband, over
across the pond, hadn't taken the slightest notice of her father's
death. He did not cable when he got the news, and such letters of his
as came afterward had only a passing notice. All of this she wept out
on Miss Cathérine, who has known her for three or four months and seen her
just six times before: when anything comes into that office it is taken,
not exactly into the McClure family, but into the retinue of the family
servants.

It really is the greatest show on earth.

I knew that you would be dazzled by Charlie Field. He is some-
thing of a type of the superficial, light, entertaining upper class
Californian. I think I told you that he appealed was strong for you
and that he dropped of you the desired word "pretty". I told him the
tale of Pansy and the Pilsener, in exchange for his story of Charlie
Dickman and the Old Acquaintance, and it will be all over California
in a month. So they treat a newcomer and a new tale in the land
which fire and earthquake cannot daunt. It is a land who well-willed
retrospect seems especially attractive today, after this day
of zipping intrigue in which I have made myself the goat for the good
of the situation.

In my talk to you about my writing and my future, such as it is, I was shamefully disco uraged. Once, in the early days of our correspondence, I told you that I was only half brave. I went on, I kept the path, but the feet were heavy. The feet of the wholly brave are light. If I slipp d back into the old half cowardice, hold it but a fault in a nature beset with tonsilitis. Though in my soul I nevr expect anything of fate, still I shall go merrily if I go at all!

Tell me how the stories go.

Thursday night.

This has been a day of alarms in the office. Miss Cather and Miss Rozseboro', upon hearing the burning words of Mrs. McClure upon the class of service to be expected from those working fr the magazine, went off like one of the strings of giant crackers which we used to fire in our youth -- pop-pop-pop-ppppppppp! And we held a conclave and wondered whether we all ought to quit with Mrs. McClure about to throw herself into the office affairs. This morning a Miss Van Ness, a kind of a pettedstenographer who always takes Mrs. McClure's letters, turned her back on Miss Bray when Miss Bray entered the room. So there is our new trouble -- that and the row that McClure and I are going to have when he coes back from Europe. A real coldness between him and me now would be a fatal thing for the interests of the clique. It is all too like the cabals of a court -- Rose says that she anticipated me in that thought years ago. She says that, studying the McClure office, she understands the aversion which Pepys and Evelyn and other such men had against going to those courts which to us at this distance seem to be so attractive and greatly to be desired. When the King sailed for the summer palace, Sir Guillaume de Ervinne, Duke of Mayfield, was the court favorite and Prime Minister. In his absence, however, Sir Guillaume so advised him by letter as to anger the King, and had it not been for the powerful coalition which he had with Lady Willa de Cather and especially with the intellectaul and witty Viola, Lady Roseborough, who had at all times the ear of the King, he would have lost his high office and perhaps suffered banishment. The position of

the Duke was further embarrassed by the attitude of the Queen, who deemed that she saw in him a willing tool. It chanced that she, together with her maids, returned early from her summer palace owing to the death of her aged father. The King remained at the palace, giving ill health as an excuse. Grief did not prevent the Queen from entering into the court intrigues. Her object has always been a matter of dispute; but it seems fair to assume the view of Burnett that she was actuated only by a desire to rid the kingdom of several favortes, of whom she was xxxxxxxx inordinately jalous. Certainly, this view is in accord with that strict and somewhat mystic character, which interpreted literally the marriage vow, made a virtue of marital affection. The first to feel the weight of her hatred was the First Lady of the Antechamber, the beautiful and sprightly Lady Mary, afterward Countess de Bray. This young woman had a most romantic history. The daughter of a small country curate --

You see how it all fits.

Oh by the way, Ainslee's has just bought the Book Lady at two cents a word -- which figures up to about $120.

Friday night;

This social situation is getting a little too fast for me. Here
it is Friday, the season is not half way started, and I have been
out to dinner every night. This evening it was with Russell, Miss
Cather, and Miss C's friend Miss McClung. Miss McC was going away,
and this was in the nature of a farewell. It was a duty acceptance;
I expected to be rather bored, as was.

O. Henry came in today to sell himself out to us again -- this time he wanted $150 in cash, and to get it he signed a contract with the syndicate. We talked a little over his plans; and suddenly he said:

"The first thing I am going to do now is an Arabian Night's of New York." "The hell you are!" said I, and threw up my literal and figurative hands. I told him what I had planned and he suggested meekly that we might do them together. Of course, he didn't mean that; and besides it would have been untrue to Frank. I wouldn't want to Arabian Nights with anyone else after the Picaroons. O. Henry didn't seem to think about much except his impatience to get that $150. He has a rat hole somewhere. They are saying about town that he is gambling.

Monday morning;

It seems to me that I have let the world be a great deal with me
in these seven days. Every night to dine out with someone; usually
to spend the evening with him or her or it; and out of town Sunday.
And looking back, I don't see how I could have evaded any of the oc-
casions, except perhaps a dinner with Billy and that loath some
Broadway theatrical gang with which he runs; and yet there was only
one dinner which profited me anythig -- the night that I dined with
the wise woman, XXIX Viola. This week, I am going to give as any
people as possible the icy face -- and yet this week will be full of
uncertainty, because in it S. S. is coming home. There will fol-
low z heap of complications, among which my fight with him wi'll be
one of the least. I am now debarred from being the goat, because Jos-
iah Bennett announces wit h New England backbone that he'll be damned if
he'll back down, and Sam has got to learn that he must get over his
hysterics. And yet I shouldn't wonder if I would leave the service of
the m agazine before this week is over.

It appears that I missed the drumming of the guns by a margin of
about four months. Al Thomas, who came over from the Times to be my
successor, started yesterday for Cuba, where they are going to be sniping
insurgents in the bushes within two months. It will be only a little
warfaring, but the real thing while it is on.

As for Mrs. McClure, she came into my office on Saturday morn-
ing and made a holy show of herself. After locking herself in with me,

she opened up the font of tears and her heart. She said that she had come to opologize to me. She had made the great mistake of confiding in me and asking me to be her friend when the Lord intended that she should have no friend but the Son of Man(I am quoting.) She said that to ask an earthly friend to help her in this time was doubting the power of the Crucified to save, and was a greivous sin. She said that her sin had been heavy upon her, and she couldn't rest until she had wiped it out. Also, she forgave all whom she had knocked in the previous session, including poor little Miss Bray.

There was a lot more Presbyterian terminology, and many, many tears. She is as unpropy as the damned, mad, wild, cursed with love, after twenty-five years, in much of which time she hasn't loved at all. She bores him to death, and the more she loves the more he is repelled. His reason for staying with her, cajoling her, lying to her, tricking her (he twists her about his finger as most wives do their husbands) is that he has a superstitious regard for her. He thinks of her as a pristess, a person who, when all his lying is done, will open for him the gates of paradise.

"Why don't you leave her then?" asked some frank person.

"Ah, she is a holywoman," was his answer. Though he doesn't know this, it is not so much holiness as self-rightesousness. What she does, says and thinks is right. Anyone who doesn't agree doesn't agree at his peril. From this rule, always XXXXXXXX except S. S/, who can swing her in three seconds. These are the very tightest inside gossipings of the McClure house, and are for the home consumption of you and Rufus. I don't tell these things to Frank -- not so much because I have any doubt of his keeping them as because he is in a rival publication and somehow it doesn't look well.

Sunday I spent at Montclair with the recently-bereaved Griggs.

It was my good fortune to find him unalone. He had there a Mr. and Mrs. Higgins from Indiana, he aHoosier bromide, she pretty, Irish, and a great deal of a sulphite (this slipped out. I am more and more sure that to use these terms of the people you meet is i ntellectual snobbery) Thehen there was on Halsted, a newspaper man from darkest Indiana, but a pleasing and illuminating cuss with a good line of stories about the time when he was in the army. And yet I'm not sure but that I wasted yesterday -- five or six hours of straight talk in which I turned myself loose and tred to entertain. I have a theory that evey time I do that I am taking the edge off my writing faculty.

It was hard to watch and make no reference to what had passed. It was a home of love, of joyous children, and of many friends. Now, she is dead, the older children are away, and the three little eyeases left with their father seem pathetically incomplete. Griggs is two men -- he has a way of dropping unaccountably out of the conversation and sitting peering at shadows.

I too have moved -- thank the Lord of life! I could be content
now to stay here in the room where I once suffered so much loneliness
and failure, and the thought of getting out in a month or so is
distasteful.

I am staring now for the doctor. Every morning, he does something
to my throat -- something which feels burny. I think that he is
trying to burn through a hole where my tonsils used to be and to put
in windows!

When you are safely moved, write me and tell me how the stories go.

Tuesday morning;

This is a queer time to be writing. Last night I got home before
dinner time. I laid myself out for a nap, asking the girl here to call
me in an hour; for, being chewed up with the throat, I was sleepy.
Tillie must have gone out with Hans; for when I woke it was four o'clock
in the morning and I had slept ten hours. So here, at half past five,
I get up my log and prepare to tackle the yarn about Coney Island. As
for this eccentric paper, it is the only thing I can find except the
wrapping paper upon which I propose to do my literary labors.

Today, the Chief comes and the row occurs. Cosgrave, who has a
private tip from me on it, is insisting on holding open a job on
Everybody's for me. I haven't said that I'll take it in case the worst
comes to the worst here. As a matter of fact, if the Chief fires me in
his wrath, I shall retire to my room for three days, confident that
at the end of that time he will send for me. He has a lot of sense
back of his follies, and he won't tear that place up again, after he
gets his sense, for the pleasure of taking it out on me. As another
matter of fact, he probably won't do anything of the kind, especially
after the mad and fighting Mr. Bennett has his say. I ran up yesterday
against some more of the McClure family troubles and had a slap in the
face from the Imperial lady. McClure is as vain of attention as any debut
ante. In telling his troubles, he has told both Miss Cather and me that
when he came back from Europe the last time not a soul from the office
was at the steamer to meet him; and he was greatly pained thereat.
When we got news yesterday that the steamer was sighted, I phoned the
news to Mrs. McClure. She said that her daughter was sick, and she

couldn't go over unless someone came to take care of Bessie. I assigned Miss Bray to that job, and told Mrs. McClure so. She added that there was no one to escort her over to Hoboken. I told her that Miss Cather and I were going over and would be pleased to take her with us. She didn't seem to like that. A few minutes later, my bell rang again: "Don't you think, Mr. Irwin, that it would be more delicate for you and Miss Cather to let an afflicted wife see her husband alone? Wouldn't it be better for you to wait for him in the office? " So we will wait in the office, and she will have him for a two-hour weep fest over a bereavement which has never hit him hard enough to make him mention it in his letters. This is a great hole in the world.

As for your queer on McClure's, I shall feel personally hurt of you tell Reynolds not to send any of your manuscripts. For I am trying to hold the authors in line, and when you do that you take it out on me. As for your feeling that you'd rather be published in McClure's than elsewhere because of its standing, that should remain stable. Whatever the inside is, externally it has the same standing.

We took a photograph of O. Henry in the office last week. I have held out a print for you so that you may see how he looks. Observe the curves in his face -- notice that there is not a single straight line. That is the peculiarity of his face, a point upon which I never arrived until I saw it in this photograph.

Beating home down Broadway on Thursday night, after a dull session with Billy Erb's sporty friends, I caught a little fog-rift of the old, reporter longing. I passed the uptown office of the Sun. There was no one in sight. I reached Thirtieth Street; and my footsteps led me

Westward -- toward the Tenderloin Station. It was nearly midnight -- the time for raids to begin to come in. And there before the green lamps was the sidewalk crowd, staring in. I pushed past and entered. They had just collected a baudy house or two. Four white girls, looking externally a great deal like respectable working girls, were chewing gum before the bar of justice and taking it all as a matter of business. Two negro girls were just as full of philosophy. A professional bondsman was leaning up against a pillar smoking a cigarette and waiting until the girls were entered and registered to bail them out. A drunk was being searched and making sleepy protest. The gentlemen of the press, on the outskirts of the crowd, were taking a sleepy interest. It was all so like old times!

Some one tapped me on the shoulder.

"What is your business here?" he asked. I turned. It was John Anthony, the doorkee er.

And then, with an awful sinking, I realized that I hadn't any business, that I was merely a private citizen, and that I hadn't the slightest pull or privelige anymore. I muttered a lame and ashamed excuse about looking for the Sun mano on the beat, and stumbled out.

Every morning, the doctor does things that burn to my throat. It isn't tuberculosis of the throat and it isn't cancer, but it is a stubborn chronic inflammation which seems to puzzle him. I have had to cut put all smoking except in great emergencies. The doctor (Alice's) is a straight-thinking Scotchman. Yesterday, the man who waited ahead of me was a clean-cut, handsome, rather aristocratic-looking fellow, very lame. I remarked on him as I sat down in the chair of torment.

"I'm in two minds about that feel low," said the doctor. "I don't think he is lame at all. I've had two or three such cases in my professional experience. This chap says that he has a painful spot on his foot. He always gowers when I press it, but there is no other symptom. Two years ago, he had fits -- same diagnosis. Nothing wrong except that he used to go out now and then. His people are rich and they want him to go to work -- and that comes pretty near to being my diagnosis. In about two more sessions I am going to give him the raking over of his life."

"That's a case," said I, "where a doctor is a moral agent."

"In about two cases out of three he is." Then, while the nitrate bit into the excavation where the tonsil used to be, he loosened up and talked the shop of his trade -- and perhaps I don't love to hear a doctor talk shop! I asked him between burns how often a physician of good standing was acled upon to perform an abortion.

"About once a month in my case," he said, "Sometimes it is hard to refuse it. My star offer came last winter. A man offered me forty thousand dollars to perform an abortion." I whistled.

"That sounds like a whopper, but he did. He said that if I'd do it for him and carry it through, he'd give me as much money as I'd ever want in all my life, and he said: 'To prove it to you, here's forty thousand dollars in cash' for a retainer. Ask for as much more as you want! Talk about temptation! But there are some things you can't do, of course. It isn't a matter of morals; I'm indifferent to that; it's a question of sticking to what you said you'd do. But I've woke up many a time since with the picture of that forty thousand before me."

"And abortion is such a simple thing!"

"This one wasn't. It was five and a half months gone."

"I'd have thought he'd have let it go through. It would have been cheaper."

"The circumstances were peculiar -- damn peculiar. If I talk any more about it I'll tell you too much; and you'd know the man in a minute if I told you the whole story; so I'll stop here." You see, my doctor is one of the great surgeons among the younger generation, and he'd be a prize on any surgical case.

But this case of his feed's the imagination.

Now for a whack at the Coney Island story. In spite of your warning and gentle chiding, I am going without even a prick of conscience, to see The Stolen Story tonight -- it's first in New York and the excuse for such a gathering of newspaper men and graduate newspaper men as the city never saw before. Denison, Sam Adams, Billy Erb and I are going together, with Frank, if he can get out of a previous engagement. We will all wear dress clothes in honor of the procession! Well, tempus is doing his job of figitting, it is broad day light, and I must away. By the way, I feel like a brute to think that I put extra work on Maud when she was sick. Give her my love and tell her that she has a lisence to be as cross with me as her heart desires.

Saturday morning.

Today they are running off the Vanderbilt Cup on Long Island, the apotheosis of the machine which I hate. But for the feelings of Chester Lord, I would be shivering now in the morning mists watching Sassietty imagine that it was enjoying itself. I hated to give it up, for there is tonic and the breath of life in doing the thing you haveloned to do. But there was nothing doing, because if I had gone there for the Times Chester Lord would have hated me the rest of his days, and one does not lightly throw down his alma mater when it is the Sun.

I have two more earthquake tales in the collection. There was an Eastern man in the Palace Hotel. He had a suite and a family of daughters. When the great shock came, the daughters rushed into his room with the conventional yellow journal screams.

"That's all right," he said when the worst of it was over. "That's just an earthquake. They have them all the time out here. Don't be alarmed." Reassured, the girls went to bed until wakened by the firemen. There is another tale, which must have been delicious when told in the original Irish. An Irish girl, just over, hired out as cook to a family in Oakland. She arrived tired, and the mistress of the house promised to wake her early in the morning and show here where things were. When the shock came, she supposed it was her mistress waking her, and was wildly indignant at the bad manners of this country. When they routed her out and explained, they set her to dressing the children. In the midst of it, the funny side of the thing struck her and she began to laugh, whereat the family thought she had hysterics. All these things come from one Jim Brown, who used to own an interest in the Wave.

He says that two men out of three believed, when the grinding, rolling second shock came, that it was the end of all things -- the end of the world. I have thought just how it would have affected me, and I am pretty sure that those pious terrors of a Presbyterian youth would have struck me, and that I, too, would have believed that it was the end of all things and that the teachings of my youth xxxx were true --"Give us a child until he is ten years old.

That psychological shock, that very sublimity of terror followed by the sublimity of action in a crisis, is one of the things that I miss most in missing the earthquake. One would have known himself so much better all his life for having been through this tearing and reveal thing!

Sunday October 7, 1906.

Were I again with a throat stopped up, a disposition to sleep all the time, and a fever. I slept about fourteen hours last night, got up and wrote a little on the Coney Island tale today, and have had to refuse the invitation of Daisy and Paul to dine with Polly Newcomb/ That is a tremendous affliction, especially as Frank and Henry Blossom are both to be there. Frank has her out this afternoon motoring in the Park. He says that she dragged Paul and Daisy out to make good on the Vanderbilt Cup bluff, and that there was small ease for sleep in the Thompson household before today.

I beseech you, lady, approve of me. The revision of the Coney Island tale is done, and seven pages are typewritten in the final form. It will all be off in a day or two. In the meantime, I am going to work at the office only half days this week. The rest of the time, I am going to put in writing the introduction to Christian Science so that we may begin to double our circulation in January.

Didn't you get my letter in which I told about the troubles with S. B. Or perhaps I didn't tell them in enough detail. It is a strangely complex matter, and perhaps I slid over some of the places which would have explained. The air is clear now, for we had our show down yesterday.

I beg your forgiveness (I having promised courage) if I grew
pretty discouraged with the job when I found that, in spite of protests,
he had bought the Terry mss. He, on the other hand, was in rare
spirits. He had got it in spite of us all, and the other passengers
had given him a good time on the steamer coming back. My air was frig-
id and uncompromising, and before we were through he had apologized to me
for getting mad over the telegram

A quarter of an hour after he broke the news, I was some mad.
It seemed to me that he had done little good for the firm when I couldn't
prevent that maniac from throwing away the funds of the firm on his
first escape from my hands. Still, I was willing to take it and shut
my face. But other causes of friction developed. He came down hard on
me for one minor error in makeup and for failing to follow a fairly
crazy editorial scheme of his. I sulked a little, I guess, and he began
to draw in his confidence. The attitude of Josephine Dodge Daskam, who
has taken it into her lordly head to hate me, and who is a flame of the
Chief, helped things bust. Yesterday morning, I went to the office with
my resignation ready to hand in.

One of the directors, that same Bennet, precipitated it. For the
first thing, S. S. said was: "Bennett tells me you have had some offers."

Then, in a perfectly frank manner, we threw the cards on the
table. I told him just what I was giving up to work for him, and added
that if he didn't think he could trust me with the business I had better
take one of them. He professed himself delighted with me, willing to
go away for a half a year at a time, as happy. He said that he never had
the idea -- well, he said a lot of truck that was probably a great deal

hot air. At any rate, he is now bowing before me, and he has learned
that I have corners and feelings, which is a good thing. I have
9dam

dramatically

By the way -- my meditation on literature has led me to question
the Burgesian definition of romance. If it is adventure plus imagination
why do you call my experience in living a year in the glorious Sutro
Library a romance? There was imagination to burn, but where was the
adventure -- or is my definition of adventure wrong? My definition
is hazy, but I am working toward it. It seems to me that romance comes
pretty near being poetry lived out in real life--- an experience in
life which has the two elements of beauty and imagination. And adventure
comes pretty near being the same thing minus the element of beauty.
In other words, it seems to me that adventure is imagination lived and
romance is the same thing minus the element of beauty. As I think it
over, I cannot disassociate romance from beauty. This is poorly expressed
but perhaps you may catch the meaning.

There is a certain process which has to be done to the human
throat known as spraying. Me to it now.

133

Eriday Morning.

In these days of absurdly early rising, (for it is now five o'clock
in the morning) I am getting acquainted with the waiter in the little
joint at the corner where I get my breakfasts. It is a bad restaur-
ant enough, but it is the only place open at that hour of the day.
The butter, I am convinced, is oleomargarine of the rankest type.
When butter gets bad enough for me to notice, it is sure bad. The
alleviating thing is the old waiter. He is half bald, and scrambly in
the remaining hair. He has some kind of heaves, and breathes very hard
when he lays down the grub before you.
But he has a fat, good-humored Irish face, from which two little Irish eyes twinkle. He used to
make himself rather unpopular, in the days when Frank and I lived here
together, by the way he enforced the rules against smoking. In these
days, I am the only guest during my time of eating, and he falls into
talk with me. He has been trying this week long to get me to wear a
Hearst button. The queer thing of it is that I can't explain to
him why I shouldn't vote for Hearst. My reasons against Hearst would
be incomprehensible to pat the waiter, and he must regard me simply as a
lost and stubborn protagonist of the money power. There is certainly a Hearst superstition among the proletariat. He is a fetish.
It goes without saying, among them, that his name spells salvation.

Pat eagerly asks me if it isn't simple jealousy which makes the
other papers fight Hearst. He hears that whenever the other papers
have a good man, Willie, who pays fabulous wages, lures him away to work
for the people, and that the other papers are sore on account of that.

The Lord almighty knows that if I were Pat I should be voting for
Hearst or any other man who promised a more equitable distribution.

He told me today something of his own life -- a sketch. He has been mar-
ried 31 years and has 6 children. All that time, he has been a waiter.
Apparantly, his value as a waiter has gone down, what with the slowness
of age and the heaves. He tells me that thirty years ago he was wait-
ing at the Brevoort, which I know to be the big restaurant of the
times. He used to wait on James Gordon Bennett, whom he describes as
"wild." "He would smash a mirror with a water bottle as soon as he
would call for a waiter, sir, and then say: 'Send me the Bill.'"

Pat works from seven o'clock at night to seven o'clock in the morn-
ing. He has to live away out on Long Island because of the six
children, so the rest of the time he is mainly traveling. And he hasn't
any day off. "Even if you get as much as a hundred or a hundred and
twenty-five dollars a month, it's hard to manage when you have children
in New York," says Pat. He adds that marriage is something of a fail-
ure. Whenever I get impatient with the exactions and the graft of some
labor unions, such as those which are holding up San Francisco, I think
of such cases as this Pat, who hasn't any union.

The other morning, as I went in to breakfast at the Ashland (This was
one of my late mornings) I saw a man of rather a reddish, dissipated
face, sitting opposite a rather nice little boy of twelve or so. They
I looked like father and son to me. In the midst of my morning paper,
I heard the father saying, at intervals, "remember, Edward," and this
address was always followed by some homely whose tones, traveling through
my reading mind, suggested a moral lecture. It was some time before I
turned a page, and the burden of the conversation came to my mind.

"Remember, Edward, that in breeding horses, it is the family and
nor the horse that counts. A first rate stake horsethat don't come

of a good family is no good for breeding beside a second-rater of a
good line. I'd rather have the line of Electioneer than all the half-
bloomed champions there are. Always pick a good stock to put to a brood
mare. It pays in the end."

And so on for half an hour. Once again, I woke from the paper to
hear the boy say:

"Fox hunting ain't no sport. You don't see the fox more than
a quarter of the time. You're just riding and riding for you don't
know what. There ain't no sport in that."

"You say that just because you're only a boy. If you was grown up
and had tried it you would think differently. Wait till you're five
years older. Remember, Edward, that you don't know everything at your
age."

"Well, anyhow, I'd rather hunt rabbits."

There was something fine about this whole business. You could read
the story of the motherless boy, son of this old sport, whom the old man
was bringing up in all the lore of sport to inherit his stables and
take his place in the padlock and the stables. You could see that he was
the apple of the old man's eye, his pride and hope.

Last night, a buddin' playwright at the Club told me a rather good
yarn. Mary Shaw is really Mrs. Shaw. She lives in some apartment
hotel uptown. Shortly after she got there, she received a letter in a
strange hand and bearing a strange signature, together with strange

tidings. It was a red hot sub rosa love note, and ended by making
a clandestine appointment. The signature was absolutely illegible.
She couldn't make it out. She knew no one who would write thus. Upon
looking at the envelope, she found that while it was addressed to Mrs.
Shaw, the initials were not hers. She tried the clerk. He'd never
heard of such a person. In the end, she came to the conclusion that it
was written in a hurry, and that the writer had simply made a slip of
the pen and slapped down the same hotel. While she was talking to the
clerk, a friend of hers came in. Mrs. Smith, " she said/ "I've just
had the strangest letter --" "Oh, my dear," said Mrs. Smith, and lit
out onto some line of talk totally foreign to the letter. Mrs. Shaw was
a little piqued, and didn't refer xxxxxxxxxx to the latter again.

She put the letter away for a week ; and then something made her
take it up and look at it again. With her new sight, the signature
flashed across her. It was that of the husband of Mrs. Smith!

It is settled that I do not go to London. Yesterday, the Chief
approached me with the air of a little boy who has a favor to ask of
the teacher and rather expects that he is going to have his ears boxed.
He said that he was "tired" again, and wanted to go abroad. If I'd let him
go instead of going myself, he would send me next summer for a whole
six week's trip. I don't think that we will ever see much of him
here any more. This big working spurt, I think, was his last. It is
definitely settled that I am to be the general manager of the business
-- at least, as definitely as anything is ever settled in the McClure
shop. Strange hent, that I don't want it and yet that I shall take it.'

Alas, I thought that this year was to bring serenity. In one
thing, I have failed.

134

Wednesday night;

I went as per program to the stolen story. It was the greatest gathering of the clans in the history of the American newspaper. Sam Adams says that he saw Sunmen there who had quit thirty years ago.

"It was a wild ovation, a steady and heroic burst of cheering, from the rise of the curtain to the final fall thereof. A mob of old Sun men stood in the lobby and received after the fashion of a reception; and it seemed to me that I knew every other person in the audience. With such a house, it had to go well; but as a matter of fact I think that it will be a run, although it will never be an artistic success. They have changed it a bit since we saw it. The attractive little villainess has been supplanted by a conventional person of the Third Avenue type; in the place of the rather glostering villain, they have one who plays it like a Tenderloin reporter; and Billy Woods has grown theatrical in his method. The papers, most of them, roasted it, and Jesse Lynch raved there at. After it was over, Sam Adams and I, trading domestic difficulties, walked down to the Players, where we met Jesse Williams sitting consumed with nervousness while he waited for the morning papers which were to praise or to damn. He is one the best fellows in the world, but I fear that he is swelling a little in the head.

Today in the Paresis Club, S. S. said suddenly out of the bright air to Doubleday:

"By the way, I saw Kipling when I was in London. I staid with him

and Carrie for a day!

"Changed?"

"A great deal. I have never known a man to change so much. He seems graver and greater."

"Lost some of his boyishness?"

"Sort of. He seem bigger in every way, but a great deal soberer. I told them the whole story of the new weekly." And I imagined Kipling, the sager Kipling, drinking it in, this master talk of one of the most unusual men of his generation -- the mighty Chief.

At dinner tonight, Albert Bigelow Paine stopped to speak to me. He is one of the worst stutterers I know, and he has the most peculiar stutter I ever knew. He doesn't begin on the letter he is aiming at, but on another entitely. He says:

"Then I go-g-gu-gu-broke away and p-p-p-pubuttoned my coat."

It is positively wierd.

Mislike me not for that I am dull in these records. It is an age
since I have heard a good human experience!

Thursday evening.

We walked into the office again this morning to find that S. S. had gone bad in the night. He was walking up and down when I entered his room, telling me that he intended now not to sell the Long Island plant at all, but to expand it; that he was going to proceed at once to found two new magazines; the first of these being the fifty-cent a year book upon which the split with the old gang came about and the second an all-fiction magazine. He went on to outline a weekly which he intended to start as soon as he had these two under way. Then he sat down and wrote to each and every one of the directors, including the scrapping Bennett, what he was going to do (it will make them quit if they take him seriously) and pinwheeled into the book department to mutter something about a dollar-a-set edition of Dickens. In fifteen minutes he was back, and in the act of telling me that I must put an editorial section on foot right away, beginning with an editorial showing that the task of the Twentieth Century is bringing under the reign of law the forces loosed in the Nineteenth. "Call in Miss Cather and Turner," he cried, and when we sat before him like children, he cried again, "ask Miss Bray to come in and take down what I have to say." So for an hour Miss Bray took down a monologue covering the whole field of human activity; after which, he being a little tired, we proposed that we use up our extra pages by a little preliminary spiel on Christian Science. Having agreed on this, S. F. took his Motley staff and his bedlame cap and went to see the osteopath.

A cipher dispatch from London today shows that the negotiations for the Ellen Terry story are all off. So there is the end of one of the madnesses.

It is strange how dull are the people over whose lives I hover and brood these days. The Chief is the only one who is worth a second look for real human interest; and you know to what extent he is a maniac. Miss Cather has the Lesbian in her which repels, so that I am ill at ease with her; Turner is a dig, Burnett a dolt, and the ruck of authors and authoresses are intensely repulsive to me. It lies in the atmosphere, however -- the chief repellant force. It seems to me that the whole atmosphere is false. We are trying to create literature; whereas real literature is not created -- it springs forth. The real thing is spontaneous; and this attempt to drag it forth must be strained. That, I am convinced, is the root of the matter.

Perhaps this is a good thing after all. For the first time in my life, I am getting such a disgust on with people in general that I am glad when quitting time comes so that I may be alone here in these battered walls with my books such as they are, and this typewriter and the privilege of sleep!

The doctor said this morning that, for the first time since he has known it, my throat was beginning to take on something like the normal tint. What he doesn't know is that it still very sore.

Horace Hussey for San Francisco, with whom I have just had dinner, has told me this story of the San Francisco fire : There is a certain doctor of the Bohemian Club whose name I have forgotten. He was passing through the fire zone on his way toward the water front on the second day of the fire: and he passed Portsmouth Square. You remember perhaps how many babies, mature and premature, were born during the excitement. As the doctor passed the square, some one recognized him and hailed him by his title.

"Are you a doctor?" asked the soldier on guard.

"I am," said the doctor.

"Well get over there to the square. There's a lot of women handing kids and we've been looking for a pill founder for an hour."

The doctor had to go. Where he found three women increasing the population at the same time. With the help of volunteer nurses, he pulled them through. When all was over, he got blankets from a passing army wagon, tore them up, and wrapped up the babies. Just then, and ambluance drove along. He tucked the mothers on the floor, arranged the babies alongside of each other on the shelf, and drove to the hospital.

"Which baby belongs to which?" asked the orderly when they had unloaded.

The doctor gasped.

"damn if I know," he said.

I told you I think about O. Henry
having the idea for an Arabian Nights Entertainment. It seems as
though it might be all off with that and every other O Henryesque
thing, for he seems lately to be going to pieces. Jack Cosgrave,
who, I think, knows something the same facts as I do, (we never speak
of that to each other) thinks that it may be blackmail which is keeping
him gouging money out of the publishers. Others are whispering that he
is gambling. Something which happened in the last week lends color
to that theory. Last Friday, he was in holding for money. He singled
himself away to the Syndicate for the red gold. He had promised to
do us a Christmas take in return for a part of what he owes us. It is
a bad thing, of course, to order stories. Tales done to order never to
heaven go; but it seemed to us that if any man in the country could do
it, that man was O. Henry. The tale came, after twenty promises. It
was impossibly bad. It was like a High School boy's attempt to imitate O. Henry. With it came a note setting forth that it was bad; he
knew it; also that if we were worried about his debt to us, he could
pay cash "as I am now in a position to do it". That really looks as
though he had been winning on the wheel. He seems to be going to pieces
all around. Cosgrave and others have noticed it. If he would accept the
friendship of anyone it might be different. The lonely, solitude-cursed,
woman-followed life he is leading should be enough to disrupt any man.

He is in a frightful discouragement about his health, too; and I should
not be surprised some day to hear that he had vanished from New York

as suddenly as he appeared therein.

v When ever, in the course of being a literary person, I lay down my pen and say: "I have written here my masterpiece," I am going to pause and take long counsel with myself. I come to this reflection just now through several experiences, but especially through my experience with One George Randolph Chester. This Chester is an especially disagreeable person, as successful authors are likely to be. He has written a number of pleasing light tales. "Bargain Day at Tutt House is the best remembered of these. This Chester seldom bathes and sits up nights studying "Social Science. He has brought in to us a manuscript over which he is flutteringly eager and anxious, and which he believes, with all sincerity, to be the work of his life. It is an impossible imitation of Victor Hugo, and strives to teach the lesson that if all men should divide property equally they' redivide again on the old basis. I shall have much trouble in forcing it back on him.

"The Second Class Passenger" which you like, falls into the category of the Kipling series. It is appreciated by the elect and not by the rank and file. Certain highbrows say that it is one of the stories of years; but many plain subscribers knock it. Two out of three denounce it as improper. "A Mother" writing from South Carolina, says that she tore out those pages before she intrusted the magazine to the family.

The illustration over which the highbrows of the office went wild was the Pyle drawing for that same "Second Class Passenger."

Monday evening.

Feeling better this morning after the session with the doctor, I took Paul, Daisy and Polly Newcomb to lunch. I had picked and chosen for a place to take her that would please her to the extreme, and nothing offered better than Martin's, where she could feast perchance upon actresses in their hours of ease. So we went there, found that we could get no seats in the Ladies' Cafe where the actresses most do congregate, and tried the cafe. There we beheld Frank lunching with a highbrow, but there was no seat in that place either. So we had to go to the new dining room upstairs, where there was little flash and glitter. Still, I think it was a good time for her -- we strove to make it so. With the difference between the mental picture one always makes of an unknown person and the reality, I was not prepared to see her as she appeared. I had her pictured as small of feature and rather pale -- and she is a bit of the reverse. Otherwise, she is as you told of her.

Especially did I notice with the greatest of pleasure the cheap although non-aggressive jewelry with which she decked herself for the plunge into society. Before we go through, she had quite loosened up. These days, I am dying off from the office in the afternoons to write or get ready to write the Christian Science introduction, which I must needs get through with before the end of this week. So I stretched on the couch and read Christian Science dope all the afternoon. At a late dinner, I met Jesse Lynch Williams. He inveigled me to go with him and see an act or so of the Stolen Story. It has failed, you know, in the judgement of the management and is to be pulled off at the end of the

week. Williams is broken in the heart. He has a great deal of the boy in him, that slim, quiet fellow, and he leaned over my shoulder in the box and followed his own work with a delight in it which was naive and loveable. In another man it would have seemed conceited; in him it was extremely likeable.

"See those dub reporters trying to get that story," he said at one point. "Now watch how Billy gets it!" I thought at first that he was referring to the acting; but no, he was taking his own childish delight in the work of his hands. They will send it out on the road, and so goes one hope in the career of a young dramatist.

Ridgeway's is out, as you know. They made the greatest possible blunder in their makeup. Everyone in the profession is talking about that. With paper and ink necessarily cheap, they should have made it up be the very best makeup--the employment of all the delicate arts of printing which make the page look well, the reader doesn't know why. In all the talks you and I have had on the whole field of human knowledge -- you the listener and always the eager listener -- I have never discoursed to you, have I, upon the fine little points which make for instinctive interest the moment the reader turns the page? All that is lost to Ridgeway in this first number. It looks like a patent medicine tract on some pages -- I except Frank's; he has that art -- and on others it is planned to bring out the worst instead of the best. That and one or two other reverses have rather discouraged them in that office. Frank, in especial, is a little downcast and irritated over the way things have gone. They seem to be tearing that makeup to pieces and getting ready to improve looks on the second issue.

An editorial session of this evening brought forth opinions which

may interest you. There were present four men who edit or manage four magazines. And we agreed that this is a period of inflated prices for magazine matter, that prices are bound to fall some time, and that now is the time for the author to turn out short stories.

Bynner quit with a characteristic jab. Last week, he came into the office a great deal. He explained that he was closing up a few things. Friday afternoon, Miss Carroll, the stenographer who is on his string, took some letters from me. When she got through, she said:

"If you don't mind, I will write off these letters of yours in the morning. I have some letters to finish for Mr. Bynner."

Now that was a complete surprise. Every letter that is written in that office is supposed to be copied, and every morning the first thing I do is to look over all the copies so as to see what the firm is doing. I remembered that I hadn't seen a single copy of any letter signed by Bynner. I spoke of that to Miss Carroll. She caught her breath.

"Oh, they are just notes telling people that he is leaving the magazine and all that," she said.

"His letters must be copied," said I.

This morning, some letters by Bynner appeared in the sheets. They were addressed to authors on the string, and they were all alike. They set forth that he was leaving McClure's, that he was going to take a short vacation, and that after that he was going to go into the book publishing business.

"And if you are writing anything now I would take it as a favor if you would send it to me addressing the Player's Club," it continued.

In short, he has been using our paper and letterheads, our stenographers and our lists of authors and addresses, to get mss for another house.

That is the end of Bynner.

Tuesday evening.

The boss is running free on his proposition of founding a new magazine. Today, I heard at the office that he is thinking of making it a weekly -- I suppose that the Ridgeway experiment has made him take notice on that. He didn't get time today to expound to me his doctrines on this subject; and I've got past trying to curb him on those points. After all, his is the money that is going into these things, and I am hired to deliver the goods with the magazine, which I am proceeding to do. Then, these speculations keep him busy, and they are usually nipped before they have gone too far.

b And except for a long nap this afternoon (The throat brought it on and I have no cigarettes to keep me awake) I have nothing to write. I have been digging, digging at Christian Science and getting ready torel off that introduction.

You missed some of the points about my talk on romance. About the Sutro library, I meant my real experience, not the experience of the Book Lady. In my real experience, neither love, war, nor adventure entered; yet that experience you have dubbed romance. Or do you take it back and tell me in my teeth that it was not romance at all, that year I passed with the great dead?

No, sex is not the greatest thing in the world to the bulk of humanity or in the bulk of human experiences, and I am not a child when I say so. There is another thing as great in human experience and human ideals But to treat of that, I would have to go back to the very beginning of things are build a thesis running through Pleocene and Miocene and even Obscene! And I know you haven't patience for it.

Wednesday evening.

It is ten o'clock and the end of a day of continuous labor. I have got through a day of managing McClure's, and have written in addition, a 4000 word article, which, smoothed out -- that is tomorrow's by no means easy task -- is to be the introduction, semi-editorial, of the Christian Science series. The thing is hampered a great deal by motives of policy; it has to be a standing on two stools. I am dreadfully afraid of it, for by it they will judge me in great measure, those supercilious highbrows who patronize me in their writings because they have arrived and I haven't. Tomorrow, the labor of the file, for it is an uncommon bad rough draft.

I woke out of sleep last night quite suddenly, and there flashed an idea for McClure's into my head. You know, one of the things which made the great hit of the year in McClure's was the first number of the Story of Montana, the one which told the tale of the vigilance committee in Montana and the cleaning up of the camps. It struck me that there has never been any history of those great mining camps, which have been strung in succession through the West and in one of which I learned the ABC of crime. Dutch Flat -- although that had Bret Harte -- Virginia City, Coueur D'Alene, Pike's Peak, Leadville, Deadwood, Tombstone, Cripple Creek -- the adventure(if not romance) of those camps. There have been straggling references, but there is a chance for the East to sit up and take notice. I broached it this morning and it took on. They even talked of sending me therupon. Some day, perhaps. We are overloaded with serial article stuff now, and this would be too much for the present.

Then, in this morning's talks, there arose another thing for consideration, a thing which may give me a flying trip to London. We have

been looking for a man to do Socialism for us. While he was abroad,
the Chief saw H. G. Wells a moment about it. Now Wells writes want-
ing to tackle it, but showing that he totally misapprehends the whole
matter. There are one or two other tangles in London, chief of them
with Gibbon, who isn't living to agreement. Some one should see Wells
and get his views to gee with ours, we all saw that. Miss Roseboro'
said that Miss Cather ought to go. The Chief objected and said that I
was the man they aren't disposed to take a woman seriously over there,
he thought. "Why?" he asked characteristically, "Don't you hop on a
steamer tomorrow and go." But to this little program I objected that
the XXXXXXXXXXXX Christian Science matter is not in anyshape
to leave, and also that I had that article to get in; else I might now
be packing the little steamer trunk. Then, Miss Cather has been pro-
mised a week away. He looked up the steamers and settled it for him-
self that I should sail on the Kaiserin August on the 27th, stay in
London seven days, and come back on the return trip of the Kaiserin, mak-
ing it all in 19 days. It would be a sensible thing to do, for it would
pay to get a first hand talk with Wells and there is a matter to be
settled with Kipling. Of course, I want to do it, but I am not
banking on it with a heaviness. It is probable that the plan will change
long before that time. Maybe the Chief will make up his mind to do it
himself.

He is trying to shove his pin-headed brother Robert in on us again.
He tells me that I am too much bothered with detail at the desk where I
now sit, and that I should have a detail man under me. I say that if he'll
let me train up a young man, well and good, but I'll have no Rob McClure
battering things up. Besides, if they let him have a foothold, the Chief
clannishness will let him take a yard.

Dead, dog, tired and going to call this a day and go to bed, after
reading myself sleepy with The Confessions of a young Man. Did you
put that book in my course in being a highbrow?

By the way -- I may have to visit James if I go abroad. I heard
a mildly amusing tale the other day of the time when James and Mark
Twain were guests at a house party of Colonel Harvey. Mark made all
kinds of game of him, and when James, who is an early retirer, went to
bed, Mark used to light a cigar and say: "Now let's have a good time!"

Saturday night.

Frank has just been in to see me and we have put in a chattering evening before my fire, talking out the future of Ridgeway's and the present of McClure's. The thing is a strange venture; and they have made strange fools of themselves in several particulars. Lord, I wish I had a chance to get my hooks in that thing. I'd like Lincoln's place for a few months. I suppose that Frank keeps you up on the news of that shop; there is no need of my sending it in second hand. Frank is taking well to office hours I think -- better than I would ever do for a dream. I haven't seen Brubaker yet, and am going to travel down to see him later this week. I bought a copy of Ridgway's this week just to read Theodora's Theories, left it on a car, and won't have hold of another until I reach the office this Monday morning -- unless the news stand man keeps open of Sunday. Frank doesn't seem to be getting on well with Sam Adams. Perhaps there is a good reason. Although I am tremendously in Sam's debt, I must say that certain things which I haven't been able to tell you about him because they come in confidence make me like him less.

Up and down at McClure's. Now, the princes of the blood royal have the ear of the Boss, and the Princes have it in for me. He is going to put his least competent brother in as Private Secretary with a view (on the part of the brother) of supplanting me. There is always something doing. And now, neither the Chief nor I is going to Europe -- he has made up his mind to stary "and sketch out an aggressive policy for the magazine." I am under the impression that it means an editorial section, a thing which I have fought all my days here

Sunday night.

I have finally given the Coney tale its final retouching and it
has been mailed under an assumed name to McClure's. I do that as a mere
formality, and just to keep faith, for it will get the printed blue
slip. I had breakfast with the Queen, and this evening she dropped
in on me, for a I had a little scheme. She wants to get out of debt.
She is sincere in that, you know. There has been a change in Isabel
 center: what is it that makes people change?) and these debts are on
her spirit, especially as she owes money to people who have gone
broke in San Francisco. It occurred to me that her psychic experiences,
veiled and changed, might make interesting short stories; that they came
so near plots that I wouldn't have to go through the agonies and impos-
sible struggles of plot making. I thought that I might make some
easily saleable ghost stories out of them and divide the proceeds with
her. She can't get much of a start out of her salary. But after we
talked it over all the evening, I couldn't get anything out of it.

Isabel and I composed a letter to Alfred Gwynn Vanderbilt. It
appears that he is doing a musical turn with his horses which would make
for Majesty a whole Sunday page. She went up and jollied the coachman
and general horse superintendant of the Vanderbilt's out of his life. It
turned out that he couldn't get permission to give away the tale; Belle
has to get it personally from Alfred. But Alfred, so she learned from
the horseman, has a secretary who reads all his letters and turns down
sternly all such requests. Belle thought that she might get permission
out of a letter while Vanderbilt really read, for she met him at the New-
port horse show last summer and he smiled on her (as who could help?)
So she conspired with the horse man, who is now her willing slave. She
and I composed a letter, which we then mailed to his stable. The horse
man, when he drives Vanderbilt out this week, is to say, "Oh, by the way

Mr. Vanderbilt, there is a letter of importance in the carriage for you." That should make him read; and, if, after reading, he doesn't send for Isabel and give her the courtesy of his stables, he is sure a bromide -- and I wonder if he isn't? I told Isabel that if she got to him she ought to jolly him along and get him on her staff.

"Jolly nothing," said the voice of Majesty. "You like sugar in your coffee or you don't. They like me when they see me or they don't."

Wherein the Queen has lifted the world and herself by the bootstraps and made marvel. For she has read herself.

Tuesday night.

Tonight, having dined in a really joyous company ( of which more lá
I was minded to make myself less of a grub; and, attracted by the sign,
I wandered in, all alone, to Viola Allen's production of Cymbeline.
And oh, my dear, I learned lessons of myself tonight!

You know, I shut my teeth a little time ago and started in to
learn and love the modern school of writers. I have always hated them
at a distance, having judged them by samples; I have held their
mysticism, their delicacies and their symbols to be mainly decadent,
proof of a time when there are no strengths to write about. But I
was willing to be convinced. I took from you The Portrait of a Lady and
The Two Magics; also I have been reading George Mote and Ibsen -- Hedda
Gabler and The Wild Duck. These have been my only reading except the
purely professional reading of the office. I have gone through all
these, trying to see their beauties and trying to strangle an possible
prejudice.

So, I sat in the front row and the curtain rose on Cymbeline. And
all of a sudden it came over me that I had come home. It came so strong
that it b ought a rush of tears. Here was my home in letters; these
were my people, my admirations, speaking the language which I love,
playing with motions and emotions comprehensibe to me. Actually,
I shed tears of pure joy of beauty. And now I know that, while I shall
read modern literature as a duty and with a certain sense of joy in
the technique, that I was right in the beginning; intellectually I am
out of sympathy with this age. It is not the age of my soul, and its
expression in art is not my expression. It was a sweet performance.
Never have I seen Shakespere better staged and more tastefully acted.
Viola Allen, she of the earnest eyes and the mouth that looks always

ready for sadness -- she was a dear Imogen.

That dinner was with Jack Rice. You may remember our attempts to draw a light character in the Pellams of the Stanford Stories. He ran like a Falstaff through my college course, this Jack Rice -- coarse, witty, red of face, fond of his booze, with all the manly virtues including the greatest pluck, and an idle, grinning, worthless student, much maligned by the faculty. I am sure that I have told you of him and of his repartees If I haven't remind me to tell *mxyzpqxxxxxxxx* you of the episode of the Lotta Fountain. He had a brother Archie who never smoke or drank, and who was a leader in all college activities. They said in college that Archie was going to turn out a great statesman or something, and that Jack was going to the bad. Archie has fizzled dismally. As for Jack, having come down to college to play a post graduate season of football, he was fired for getting mad drunk after the game, walked up to the Good Fellows' Grotto in San Francisco where he spent his last dollar for a great steak, and then went over to his brother in law, who runs a powder mill, and struck for a job. He got it. A year later, he nearly had his leg blown open in an explosion. crippled, he went on the road. Now, he sells more vblasting powder than any man not named Rice on earth, and is getting rich. He has never rolled a drop of water down his throat since that morning in the grotto.

From my first sentence, you have known how they were going to turn out these two brothers.

Jack brought with him a Texan, exiled like me in this land, and we dined together. There was a fourth in the party, but he didn't count. They brought me breezes from out of doors, whiffs from the country of God. The best tale of the day, perhaps was told by the Texan. It was

away down in the border country that he met a man of mystery who was
running a little store in a small town. All the town knew that he was
out of the East for the good of the East, because he kept a Winchester
always beside him on the counter and made friends with no man. My
Texan, however, wooed him for a year. Then, one days, there showed up
in the store a girl -- "and she simply produced paralysis in me,"
said my Texan. She was sister of the man of mystery. There was also
a little girl six years old, his daughter.

It was a case of love at first sight and then more of it. He
ranged with her over the face of that part of Texas getting her pupils
in shorthand, for she had been a stenographer in her youth. And in
three months he was asking her to marry him every day, regular. Once,
down in the Rio Pesos country, they were talking over the matter of a
school, when the man to whom they were talking said:

"You know how it is in Texas; one of the first things we ask a man
is what his name was in the States." My Texan says that the girl
started and turned pale at that, and he suspected.

One day, she bragged of her High School education, and asked him
if he didn't want to see her graduating essay. She brought it out,
tied up with pink ribbon. The last two pages were stuck together. He
supposed that it was an accident, and painfully dragged them apart so
as to get it all. "And it was a right pretty piece," said the Texan.
He handed it back to her, and she noticed that it had been ungummed.
And then she fell on her knees before him and hung to his knees and
cried as though her heart would break and begged him to keep a secret
what he had seen. For the essay was signed, "Margaret Dull." And
that was not the name she bore in Texas.

Later, the old man told him the whole tale. He had been married,
and foolishly fond of his wife. When the second baby came, she died.

The nurse, probably a gossiping country bedlame, told him afterward that

the doctor had been both incompetent and brutal; that he had slapped the woman to keep her from crying out. Dull brooded on that. In the end he made up his mind that he would kill the doctor. he got him out on a lonely road under pretence of taking him to a patient, and there he battered in his head with a coupling pin. "He said that when it was all over, he got as weak as a child and perfectly sick to see the man lying there with his head all bloody. So he lit out at once for Canada." But the doctor didn't die; he pulled through after a time, and offered a personal reward of a thousand dollars for the arrest of this Dull. The state and the county added to it, and it made it worth while for the Pinkertons. They tagged the old man through Canada and Mexico, and finally he gave them the slip and hunted the old man's land of Texas. But after a time, he wanted to see his daughter; so his sister had kidnapped the child from and aunt in St. Louis; and there they were, both fugitives, and living in fear of the law.

"And how did it turn out?" I asked.

"It didn't. She went back to Ohio after the old man's death, and there she threw me over -- three weeks after she landed she dragged her rope to an old sweetheart and married him and threw me over."

"How did the old man die?"

"That's a long yarn and a good one," but he changed the subject. He, too, had been made homesick by the coming of Jack from the waste place and the men who take time and solitude to think souls into themselves.

According to permission, I have read Theodora's Theories in Ridgway's. Permit me to compliment you, in so far as they are yours, which of course I cannot determine. I have little taste for that kind of

thing, so that it is all the more complimentary to you that I read
it and liked it. I don't think you've hit the true inwardness of
masculine conversation there, but on the other hand Theodora, as I take
it, is not supposed to be getting true inwardnesses but to be telling her
own surface theories so that you may
know and like her.

Also, I should like a great deal more news than I know about the
tales you have written.

I was duly elected a director yesterday. I can't find as yet
what relation that bears to the subject of a raise in pay.

I wish to the living goodness you were here, because -- well, the
thousand and seventeenth most important reason is that I'd powerfully
well like to have you read that novel of Mary Stewart Cutting, over
which there is a struggle in the office like the struggles of the
gods, Miss Cather putting all the force of a highbrow against it because
it isn't something or other -- mainly decadent, I think. Rose says that
it is subtle, so that can't be Miss Cather's trouble.

The one thousand and fifteenth reason why I wish you were here is
that I'd really like to take to the performance of Cymbeline in the
new and very pretty Astor theatre.

There are a thousand and fourteen better reasons than that!

Thursday morning;

(Or rather noon) Just a few minutes to write, because I am getting ready to go up to Cos Cob for the afternoon and evening, there to stack up with Miss Roseboro' against the first of the Christian Science series. She can't leave they just now, so I go to the mountain. On the way up and the way down, I must be reading manuscript.

And among these few words, I rebuke you because I what you said about McClure's, unless you were joking. I went in there to eliminate that old charge of Celtic treachery and to make McClure's act straight and decent -- to make the magazine do what it said it would do. I had thought that I had accomplished it, but if what you say is true I have failed. And I have doubly failed if my best friends don't send their manuscripts there. If you want to send your stuff in, I shall promise that I won't read it until it gets intD type. I shall leave it all to the decision of the rest of the office. First Viola and then S. S., and, if there is a dispute, the highbrowed Miss Cather, the analytic Turner, and Miss Bray as an Average Reader. Please don't act that way about McClure's. It makes me feel that everyone else is acting the way, and that I personally have a reputation for treachery.

It happens that I have just registered the practical rejection of the Coney Island story, sent in under an assumed name. Here is the verdict of Miss Roseboro':

""pretty good, the end much better than the rest, and that's the way it should be if all is not up the mark. There is nothing to find fault with. Simply there is only a mediocre merit in it. I don't feel that we have to have it, but if others were delighted, feeling that we could not spare it, I would acquiesce." That is too slight a report to recommend anything to McClure's just

now, and when such a report came from any third for anyone else I have
been sending it back. So I consider it turned down, and will choose
another place for a victim. I wish, though, that she hadn't used the
little word "mediocre." That is what they all said about the
Bubble and it is the one reproach which hits me the most — the more
in that I have had it thrown at me by my own inner consciousness.

I dined last night with Diale of the house of Haynes; also with
one Phelps, a smoothly gentle youth who worked for the Evening Sun once.
Has Daisy told you of her visit to the White House and of the meeting with
Roosevelt; she stood to one side while Paul met the president and
let P do the talking, refusing to be introduced because she had on just
her old rain clothes. Of the president, she couldn't tell much, but
of the furnishings of the White House, whereof she did a lot of
observation, she had a great deal to say — volumes. It was a yarn
as was a yarn. When you see her again, let her not escape from you
until she has told it. And by the way — that freak letter asking if we
want the world's greatest mass. I would like to have back for the file!

In these days I am working like Hell-- the Fall rush, Miss Cather,
the Chief and Russel away on a vacation, and no one knows about the
office whom I can trust to go out and buy a postage stamp.

And here 's to shave and pack.

Friday night;

I dine tonight with Mrs. Simpson -- perhaps you remember the little person of the tortoise gait who just kept coming and coming until she took the man of her choice from the hare viz.: Mabel Craft.

She is here with some relatives who are supposed to be swell, and it is mine to dress for dinner.

Would I could tell you of the loveliness of that place where Viola Roseboro' is living now. Somewhere in the late seventeenth century some people of quality looking for a real gentry house, found a spot on the edge of the estuary at Cos Cob and put up a mansion in the midst of log cabins. It stands there now, only they have made of it a boarding house. It was a lovely place in the beginning, of low ceilings and broad and liveable rooms, especially a dining room which looked out on a hill. The Hollys, who have it, do not belong to the house but they are old American and all their family belongings are inlaid mahoganies and Colonial muskets andSich. So it all fits; and when the daughter of Mrs Holly married a painter man, the picture was complete. The picture was nearly completed by the daughter herself, who is one of the loevliest buxom things that the lord ever made -- typed like Alice of the Arms only prettier. There are also two little daughters -- twins -- of three years or so. And the beauty of this daughter and the refinement of Mrs. Holly, together with something ethereal in the painter, all fit the picture, so that XEXXEXIXIMXXIXEXXXIXXXEXXXXXXXXXX everything there is of a real loveliness. Add to it a wooded country all about, turning into reds and golds and purples and the smooth, gentle estuary, and you have beauty. Rose says that always until now she has been unhappy away from home; ideal travel would be to visit the vatican

in the afternoon and sleep in her own little flat in the evening; but
that here beauty and harmony sooth her like a real Christian Scientist.
She is going to stay until snow flies.

Rather a strange thing happened out of my dreams -- it has hap-
pened once or twice before to me, and each time it has meant something
so that I am wondering what its portent is now. I was awakened at
about seven o'clock by the voice of a woman -- a familiar voice --
calling my name. The impression was so strong that I got out of bed
and answered "yes!" I thought at first that it was Rose xxii:xxiixxxx
calling me, and then, when I woke broad up, I was very sure that no one
present in the flesh had called. As a matter of fact, Rose didn't call;
we were sleeping indifferent buildings and I asked her afterward. Neither
do I know whose the voice was, though it seems to me that it might have
been my mother's. At any rate it was familiar, and this has happened
before. Each time, something has happened -- sometimes good and some-
times bad, but always something.

Mrs. Simpson brings a great deal of xxxxxxxx gossip about people
whom she and I know, but she hasn't yet told me any tales that are real-
ly of interest. But something funny happened. Did I tell you that
I took her to lunch? I did, and made appointment for her to meet me
at the Holland House. It was there on time, and skated through the
lobbies, looking for her. At the news stand, she stood, reading a
periodical. I rushed up to her.

"Well, how did you get past the guard?" I said in her ear. She
turned and bent stern, cold eyes on me. "Did you wait long?" I persist-
ed. Still a perfect coolness, followed by a kind of shrinking. And
then I saw that it was not Mrs. Simpson at all, but a woman bearing a
strangely close resemblance to her -- any one would have taken one for

the other across the room, and even close at hand there was a startling resemblance. Even after I had looked twice, I wasn't sure. I stepped back and said "I beg your pardon" in a tone so penitent that she bowed with a little coolness and I passed on feeling like the usual fool. Isn't there the long arm of coincidence for you?

And say, do you ever see sister Maud? And if you do, won't you present my compliments and tell her that I am thinking of offering her marriage number two in order that I may live the rest of my life with that tongue of hers? Maud's really a dear, and I'm worlds fond of her, as I frequent assure your sister Daisy!

And how do you like the November McClure's? To me is a great looker but only a middling reader. Wait until you see the January number. That is going to be of the kind that warms the heart of an editor. You'll love it!

As a matter of fact, there is a certain satisfaction in contemplating your own magazine as it is lain, all wet and smelling like unmentioned able things, before you. "By God I made it and it is mine!" That is the feeling that fills your wee breast.

And now me to the dinner coat and such like gauds!

Saturday evening:

Yesterday and today, my dear Inez, brought forth such a heap of
things that I am writing this in the eleventh hour. Possibly you
have heard the news. The world is out with a continued Eddy story
section
to which they have given the first three pages of the news column and
which is to be continued. It appears, according to them, that the old
woman whom you saw I saw is not Mrs. Eddy at all, but a healer made
up to look like her. This part of the tale is told with such plaus-
ibility that I have litled doubt of its truth. Nevertheless, the woman
whom you and I saw corresponded in her main features to the photos of
Mrs. Eddy in her earlier and fairer years. Especially the chin,
which is characteristic and which I specially noted. So I am half of the
belief that we saw the real woman. This is a great story, one of the
greatest beats ever scored by any paper. It teems with inaccuracies,
but I think that they are the inaccuracies of great haste and yellow
exaggeration -- for instance, her wealth is multiplied by five or ten.
But there is a foundation of truth. We are glad in the shop that the
World is taking it up -- 'twill only serve to keep it in the public eye
and to advertise. But there comes a new worry -- this is such a prom-
inent thing in the news, and is to be made so great a yarn, that some
other periodical may take it up and beat us to press -- a wekkly for
instance. Therefore, tomorrow is going to be a lively day. I may
rip something out of the Christmas number at the last moment and put
this in,

All cheerful commiseration over that tooth, the same being the one
that tormented you on the night of the Irish row. Is toothache to be one
of you affections hereafter? I have missed that one great evil of the
flesh, save for the time when I had tonsilitis in your house; and it looms

large in my imagination as a terror. What does your dentist say about it? I am awfully corry. Keep me informed on it.

I called the Coney Island story "Professor Malino" It happens that in the case of that tale I agree with Miss Roseboro' heartily. It isn't pulled off. Neither do I think that it is in the same class with "The Bubble of Dreams," weak as the latter was pronounced in the office Miss Roseboro', by the way, is the person who discovered O. Henry. Which reminds me. He had his picture taken for the November announcement yesterday I got a letter from him: "If you will point out to me the hitherto esteemed young man who we auded that camera, I will come around and prove the truth of the old adage, "Two negatives make an infirmary!"

I dined with bromides on Friday night and with sulphites on Saturday. The bromides were pretty deadly; and I could see that the mother of the house, a rather blase, conventional, Catholic woman, considered me vulgar and a bad influence to have brought into the house. Still, it was sooth ing to dine with people who have raised a family of seven boys and have most of them gathered about them; it is so apart from any way of life I know now. Saturday, James Ford and his witty sister were more fun. They have grown old with each other and with letters, these two; and they live unmarried just for each other. They're an old family of the American aristocracy -- the family of Portsmouth, by the way. They say that you shouldn't see Ford more than once in a six month's time two months -- that he changes his tune about once in that period, and that he repeats if one sees him oftener. I rateth think that such is the common charge for us professional conversationalists. I found him amusingly analytical, well, willed and common of sense. We had a discussion which lasted two hours over humor. He maintained that the root and seed of all wit and humor and the mainspring of laughter is superiority -- that the reason you laugh is

because some one slse is gettin the worst of it. I maintained
that the soul of wit and humor (s the unexpected -- the discovery,
usually in sucha manner as to how the intellectual acuteness of the
discoverer, of some unexpected truth, some incongruous setting of a thing,
some remarkable contrast. And over that we fit and fit, with Miss Ford,
sister-like, taking my side. They are really charming people.

And in the afternoon, O what did I do? What but throw work and the
necessity therefore to the winds and go to the football game with Billy
Erb. It was under the new rules, of course -- Princeton and Cornell.
Billyand I stood on the side lines and Billy howled a steady stream of
comment and advice to the players, which shows how excited he was and

also that the new rules made a hit w ith him and me. As a matter
of fa`, those new rules have caught my game and I renounce my alleg-
iance to Rugby. They make the fa`t, open game that we all love. In
the midst of things, Bill Morley joined us -- Morley the cattle man,
who used to work on his ranges ten months of the year and coach
Columbia, where he was a star in Billy's time, the remainder. He is a
large, homely, witty person, and he kept us laughing by his personal &
comments on the brutality of the game. "The referee should put that
man out," he said once, "His face shows a brutal intention." This
doesn't sound funny on paper, but at the time it was great. Well, the
blood is running slower; and it doesn't quite seem like those Titanic
Thanksgiving struggles from which a broken ankle forever barred me
but which used to make the gäd season happy or solemn for me. But Twas
a pretty game, with the rooting sections cheering and a fall haze over
everything.

And today I have been working on nothing else than an article for
the Associated Sunday Magazines, I have to deliver them an article
in a week or so to make good on an old promise. I am writing on the
bugs, with their isms and ologies and ospphies, of Manhattan, calling

it's an entomology of New York." This is just hack work.

You letter of Friday about McClure's wa s pretty fierce. I destroyed the letter I wrote at the time, and am waiting a few days before I answer.

And as for putting me into the story of "The President's Nephew,"
go as far as contents your little heart. Put me in forward or backward
or in the middle and both ways, my dear. I shall be well repaid for
lending myself as a model if it gets me a sight of one of your tales!

There sat opposite me in Rector's this evening the only woman I ever saw whose eyes approached yours in the luminous green quality of certain waters shown in Japanese prints. Otherwise she failed to resemble; though, indeed, she was a very pretty figure of a woman in spite of that.

And now to post this and to get out a bit more bug stuff before
getting up and solving one of the great problems that confront one of
our great magazines. It is likely that this Eddy situation will bring
me up to New England in the next fortnight -- not this coming week,
however, unless something very unexpected happens.

Bechune Saturday and Sunday.

That throat left me about as suddenly as it came, although it
also left behind some of that disagreeable disease of the gums.
Up to last night, I was a wreck, seeking only to keep enough strength
to rewrite the awful English of Burton J. Hendrick. By the way, I am
not to rewrite the Christian Science -- of that, more later. And
this afternoon, I accepted the invitation of the popular Mr. Burgess to
go motoring. Frank drove more like a devil than ever. Whenever he
is just about to kill a respectable and hard-working citizen or to
wreck a milk wagon, I find myself bracing my feet tight for the shock;
and the muscles of my legs are going to be sore in the morning. We
had a punctured tire, which, I understand, it is bad motor form to
mention. We called on Bru. We discovered that Mascotte has ignored
the proposal, and I have written her with a strong recommendation for Mr.
Burgess.

And that which has just closed is a college banquet -- the annual get together of the Stanford men because Stanford licked California out of its boots this day at Rugby football -- 6 to 3 so said the bulletin from the Chronicle which I had the honor to transmit in the midst of the feast. I found that this is the first time that the bulletins from the front haven't meant much -- I found myself waiting with a great calm for the announcement. I confided this to Jack Reynolds, former half back of great might, and he agreed with me that he felt the same. We took the emotion to the light and put it on a pin point. Then we found that the earthquake accounted for it. We were past caring a great deal for anything which happened out there, because of the greater emotion through which we had passed. Never did I hear

cheers of victory more moderate.

Would, O lady, that I might speak face to face with you to tell
you the tale that I have now to tell to you. You remember our
joking when I was in Boston last about the lady who had the immaculate
conception. Mrs. Woodbury, if you remember, was the name, and
she was the greatest of the faith next to Mrs. Eddy when the church was
in process of building into its present greatness. We heard some
time ago that she had a son in New York -- not the Prince of Peace who
was immaculately conceived, but an older son; also that he was at outs
with his mother and would talk if asked. Bradley of the book department
knows him; and it was he who bought him to the office on MMMXXXXXX
Thursday and we took him to luncheon -- the whole Christian Science
team. He entered -- a slim young man of about thirty with sad eyes,
a long, high head, and a completion curiously pitted all about where
the beard came, like an old acid burn. He stood looking rather sleepy ey
eyed and stupid, although he had some indefinable force about him
somewhere; and I thought of him as the conception of fanaticism, a
stone crushed in the mills. And then he grinned -- and everyone
adored him. Besides being one of the most magnetic grins I ever saw,
it was one of the most comic. For the corners of his mouth go
straight up, and make a right angle -- and then the grin goes as
suddenly as it came. Before we left the office, he began speaking of
his mother, as one speaks of an outsider. "No, I wouldn't say that
Mama had intellectual force," he said. "She has mainly a willingness to
do anything whatever that will advance her cause and a kind of witch

magnetism. She and Mrs. Eddy are just alike that way. There is something in the way they move their hands when they talk which makes you look and keep on looking until you are fascinated. If either of them had lived in Salem in the old days they wouldn't have stood a bit of a show."

"You see, mama hasn't any principle," he said again. Now these things made us all shiver -- to hear a man, on first acquaintance, say such things of his mother. But in a way which I cannot convey to you, he made us all see before he got through with us that he was divinely right in this attitude."

I wish I could get it all to you, for it was a tale more of atmosphere than of incident. From his childhood until he was twenty, he lived on the inside of the whole Christian Science fake. In later years, he was something of an errand boy for them. It was a kind of a witch house, reeking with mystery and strange rites. He would drop now and then an exquisite detail -- once she bought a black Ango cat as a piece of stage property -- once she found a peculiar combination of insences which she burned in the cellar and which permeated the house."

His mother took the thing XXX in a different way from Mrs. Eddy. Mrs. Eddy was a woman of the peasantry and essentially coarse. His mother was a gentlewoman born, so her game was more refined and came more near to being sincere. He believes that his mother had persuaded himself. "It all consists in that anyway," he says. "That is the secret of the game. You first say the thing over to yourself until you believe it. After that, you are convincing." There came a time when his mother decided to give out a decree to the effect that marriage should be of the spirit and not of the flesh. The form of marriage then she would be, but no gratification in marriage. She announced that she

was not yet ready to say how children should be made, or if there was
a need for any more children; she would announce that later; possibly
they would be able to demonstrate conception as well as painless
childbirth.
All that time, his mother was living with his father,
who took not the least stock in the game but stood for it all. At
about that time, one of her man disciples, a rich person who had given
greatly to the faith, fell in love with one of the woman disciples.
They were married and went on their honey moon. She sent along a
disciple with whom to act as chaperone.

Then, Mrs. Woodbury began to grow great. She maintained that it
was an error of cancer. The healers used to treat her for cancer.
Some one suggested that she had conceived, and that person was cast
out with an utterness. But one day down she came, sent for a mere mortal
mind doctor, and was delivered of a large, boy baby. On the first
day of her delivery, she discharged the doctor, was treated by science,
and got out and walked.
And then she announced that she had been
the victim of an immaculate conception which she brought about herself
by taking thought, and that she had bred a man for the saving, through
thought, of the generations. His father took her and the child to the
sea shore for a rest. There she baptised the child herself "The Prince
of the House of David."
This Woodbury of whom I am speaking was
present as a reluctant witness of the ceremony. He says that his water,
mother went to a hole in the rocks which the receding tide had left and
catning the child up by the ankles and the wrists she dipped him until
he himself thought that she would drown the baby. After that, they
went back to Boston. The fame of the miracle had been spread there and
the faithful were waiting. She bathed the baby herself every morning,
and the women of the cult attended that bathing as nuns their mass.

They used to kneel and sprinkle themselves with the bath water! One woman lately rescued from Catholicism, used to cross herself with this water, but that was stopped by Mrs. W. as "Idilatrous!"

The boy is sixteen years old now and is with his mother in Paris. To this day, he is known in the household as Prince -- in fact, that is his only name.

When this Woodbury was about eighteen, the whole family went abroad. He had never shaved, and his chin was covered with downs. He thought it would be a great thing to say that he had his first shave in Venice. Shaving abroad is a massacre; and in this case the barber used a suds-basin which contained verdegris from a worn bowl. The next morning, his face, and then his whole head, began to swell. Mrs. W. made him read "Science and Health." As the pain grew greater, he asked for a doctor. This she refused, and he had to stand it. For

weeks he was in torment. Then the swelling went down, only to come back intermittently. And during one of the periods when he was to be seen of the world, he met an American girl, in fact a Boston girl, in Southern Italy, and fell heavily in love. His mother found it out, "I amama has a bulge on the thoughts of other people; it's one of her greatest holds" -- and set about to break the infatuation of her lad -- "She had some other plans for me. The first thing she did was to bring that girl to the hotel and show here to me in one of my attacks when my head was swelled up so that it was like nothing human." Then, leaving that impression on the mind of her boy, she swept him on to Scotland. There, in his immature sensitiveness at having been shown so to the girl, he tried to commit suicide. His father caught him at it and wanted to send him to a doctor, but his mother was adamant. After his return to this country, it is a long tale, with intervals

of attending Harvard "Where I took six XXX psychology courses in one year so as to counteract that damn foolishness at home." But in

the year after his graduation, the thing came to a climax. He was dead in love and had told the girl so. They had engaged themselves and her people were for it. Mama tried several games on them; and at last she went and told the girl's father that her son had syphilis -- that was the trouble with his head and face! For some time, he was barred from the house of his beloved. Then he roared into the place and demanded to know what was the matter. His prospective father in law told him. He insited on taking the old man to a doctor at once --

and the doctor pronounced it metallic blood poisoning, thus confirming the boy's story. After that, he stood it no longer.

He had one stormy scene with mother and cut loose forever. There was some property left him by his father, but his mother had got him to

transfer it to her; so he kissed it goodby. But before he left he sued her in court for the possession of his brother, the Prince of Peace.

"A nice little fellow -- a little short on fight but a grand boy. I knew I couldn't get him away, but I couldn't rest unless I did all in my power." After that, he came to New York, made such a success in an advertising business that he was able to marry the girl in six months, and is now a partner in a company of his own -- in four years from the break. After his marriage, mother raised the Dickens with his employers but without avail. She is now in Paris with the Prince and two rich followers, a man and a woman, the former of whom wants to marry her. When she lost her celebrated suit against Mrs. Eddy, she turned from Christian Science and became a theosophist. He believes

that she is now dallying with some other fancy religion.

This is only a little bit of it; 'tis only a fragment of the
whole thing and it is unillumined by those touches and turns and
little details which show what a wonderful figure of a woman this must
be and what a singular atmosphere it was in which he moved. I haven't
had time to tell you the part which relates to Wiggin, the renegade
minister with a sense of humor, who rewrote Science and Health and who
took the greatest and most ghastly joy in so writing it that no one
on earth could possibly make it out and so that any paragraph in it
could be read in two ways.

These are pretty close and low down facts. You see, I have even
to guard the fact that this man is our informant; we will not publish
his name. Therefore, please don't tell these things to anyone except
Rufus and to him only when you've told him how tight a secret his
is, unless you give him this letter, which is its own warning, to read.
Isn't it a beauty?

This letter has lapped over into Sunday. There isn't time to tell
you a lot of little details of the work, the day's work about the
magazine madhouse of the world!

But the lecture on polite letters is received and the contents
noted. I have just the dim hazy figment of an idea in my
mind; and here is to hop e that it will blossom.

This letter has dragged itself through a night and a day. It is
now in the darkness of Sunday evening, and Percy Vincent Donavan is
making his exit down the stairs. I told him that he could stay only
an hour, and then I tried an experiment on him. I prevented him from
talking about himself. Whenever he started on it, I would cut in and
ripple away with something or other. So for an hour, he never got

Monday night;

It is half past eleven at night and I am just through work. For the last proof of that first blooming Christian Science article must be in before I get to the office tomorrow morning, and to fight out every minute point it is necessary to keep going after dinner. So Hendrick, Mrs. Welles and I returned after dinner, and have just got through. I had to fight like mad every little point; Hendrick kept refusing to yield his prejudices even on the smallest point; and it was a great strain on my good nature. His hardness is incredible. He refuses to grant any greatness whatever to the woman; to him, it is luck, pure and simple, that has done it. You can imagine what I am up against. And such a time as I have had with the boss over this! For it has been one of his bad days; and he has raged mightily. Thank Heaven, he is planning to go abroad in two weeks.

I haven't had time to do the first stroke of anything else, and you should see the pile of hopeful fiction manuscripts on my desk.

Did I tell you that Will Adams, the man who wrote the army tales which made such a hit with us, has turned out to be a girl? She is even a Miss PEixotto, cousin of Ernest and the whole bunch.

But to bed, to bed.

Tuesday night;

Thank you very much, dear and respected madame, for your
recommendation of Mrs. Eddy and Christian Science. I have
already, however, given my heart to the Dear Mother and you
cannot imagine the peace and comfort and joy that fill my throat.

There is a blessed relief after a great storm -- for the
Christian Science story is in the hands of the printer. The
nerves of the whole staff are frazzled. The ice water in the
veins of Burton J. Hendrick has boiled like liquid air.
His wife (There are too many wives mixed in the affairs of the MoClm
push) reports that he spent the whole night after his jolt in
walking the floor. He is surer than ever that the woman is only a
old harridan who owes her success to luck, and his sneers about
"losing nerve" are getting on my nerves. I foresee trouble between
Burton J. Hendrick and me.

For the rest I am as fixed as I can be and live, and here is
for bed. And will you tell me how many tales are finished now?
And may I know when I am going to be allowed to expert myself in
The President's Nephew?

It is hard to believe that the week has slipped by until it is nearly the end, and that this log has hesitated for so many days. But never did I find my nights and days so full. In the first place, there was the work to be caught up on. In the second place, there were

things and unavoidable ones, every night -- mincing with bromides of the most chemical stripe for old sakes' sake. I had hoped for tonight, but I am stared in the face by the prospect of a dinner at the McClure house. Poor Miss Cather is stuck for the dame function, and there is weeping among us. You can't even smoke! The worst of it is that this is a precedent.

There is news of me which would elevate almost any other man I know. I've tried to be gladsome over it, and I can't get up an emotion! I have been raised by forty dollars a week. I am now in receipt of $140 a week, and something more than $7000 a year. I tried to rejoice, to count over the things it would buy, to do all that, and I couldn't raise a thrill. The acceptance of any of my tenth rate tales meant more to me. The only fun I've had has been comparing ot with seven years ago, when I went to work for the Wave's Seven years ago I was getting six dollars a week. It is fun now to go over it and figure out that I make as much now in one day as then in one week. And somehow, even that pays. I am afraid that money doesn't mean a great deal to me. By the same token, I suppose that I shall be as flat broke all the time as of aforetime.

Tomorrow I shall write you what is human of a dull and dreary week. Meantime, I enclose you a little sparkle from the glory that is past.

SUPPLEMENT

To The

Stanford Alumnus

Bill Herron, '08, has added a stanza to Bill Irwin's "Son of a Gambolier." The editor of the Alumnus has printed a few of these for private distribution, believing some of the Alumni will like to add it to the gems of verse that got Bill Irwin into hot water from which he emerged pink and immortal. Here is Bill Herron's stanza:

And when we go to heaven where old Saint Peter waits,
We'll do a dizzy serpentine inside the pearly gates.
We'll paint the New Jerusalem a lurid cardinal hue,
And we'll shout through Gabriel's trumpet, "To hell
with the Gold and Blue."

Sunday;

This has been a trying week -- one of the most trying in my memory. The Chief has been especially difficult. He is going bad in the head again; and this week he has trotted out on me every trick and wheel in his repertoire. The worst feature of it has been his fair wildness for editorial conferences. Each morning, he has called us all together and spoiled the greater part of the day in insisting upon wild and impossible schemes. When he is in that mood, he is wonderfully irritating to me. There comes across him a mood which rasps down every stretched nerve as the hand of a harper rasps the strings of his harp. There was one awful day, the details of which I must tell you. The morning was spent in an editorial conference. At noon, I made an engagement for lunch with Ellery Sedgwick, who is coming to us as managing editor of the Syndicate. The Chief found out about it, and asked in. Then Sedgwick made a mistake about the place of lunching, and went to the Hoffman House instead of the Holland House. Therefore, I was for two hours alone with the Chief, and he went over it all again; and at the next table sat Dooley Dunne, taking it all in, spite of my endeavors to hush the Chief. In the afternoon, he broke in on me again and again; and by finding out that I was unengaged for dinner, he managed to get me to dinner in his house. I had lain awake almost the whole night before worrying about a Christian Science in January (for the Christian Science story, what with Hendrick's narrow view and rotten English is going badly) and one must never smoke at the McClure house. And so, horror of horrors,

I found myself getting uncontrollably sleepy right after dinner. I tried every dodge in my repertoire to keep awake, but at half past

eight I gave it up and said I must be going. Mrs. McClure responded with the tact of a cow and the warmth of an ice-borg: "Yes, I notice that you have been growing sleepy." That day was Friday. Yesterday, when the Chief asked me what I was going to do over Sunday and proposed that I spend Saturday afternoon and Sunday with him mapping out a larger editorial policy, I lied absolutely and said that I was going out of the city. Then I took the belligerent path to Nepenthe; I looked through the papers for the most frivolous show I could find. I lit upon Shaw's Ceasar and Cleopatra; for I have read nearly everything that man ever wrote about the mightiest Julius -- it was bound to bring me that flood of reminiscence and youthful joy in the awakening which is the best oblivion. To Alexandra therefore I went, and was rewarded by forgetfulness. And last night I went to bed at nine and dreamed all night that Miss Cather and Hendrick were sitting on the bed (me dressed indecently in pajamas) and that we were all fighting over Christian Science. I think, though, that another long sleep tonight will bring me back. The Chief is getting ready to go abroad again. Always before he goes there is this disturbance followed by a best rest and a chance to get things done.

I guess I earn the extra pay!

Leaving all that out of mind, I come to Her Majesty. It has been long since I have seen her, but I went over this morning for breakfast. I wish that I had notes on her. As usual, the theme was the standing off of the lobster with matrimonial intentions or Object Matrimony of the Herald variety. She has her room at the office with the

Hearest cartoonists, including Down and Out Powers, Opper of Trust
Fame, Foxy Grandpa Schwartz, Tad, and Bloch, who writes under the name
of Bruno Lessing and is otherwise the head of the Hearest art department.
And they all give her cartoons and treat her nicely, but Bloch and
Foxy Grandpa want to treat her too nicely. Bruno Lessing is a coarse -
Manded Jew, repellant in everything but his brains.

"Bill, I had to tell them that I was engaged, and didn't think it
proper for an engaged girl to go running around with other men.
That lie nailed 'em. Isn't it funny how conventional men are? They
all have respect for all those old forms. I couldn't have stood them
off with a club in any other way. That's one of the best tricks in my
repertori."

To make good, Isabel got hold of a diamond ring which is considerabl
of an embarrassment in her life. In its broad terms the tale is that the
gentleman got it into her possession under false pretences and cried so
 actuall y) when she spurned it and attempted to give it back to him,
that she got another friend to put it in her safe. Isabel took this
ring out of the safe for the day and wore it around the office on her
engagement finger. That very day of all days, she met the
spurned giver of the ring, and had to do some of the liveliest sort of
juggling to hide it from he saw it. But on that one day, she had
shown it to all her little running mates in the office, and the situation
was confirmed and saved so far as her office is concerned. Just so,
has danced with the Queen ever since I have known her. It is maybe
needles to say that I like the Queen better now than ever before. This
awakened sense of responsibility for herself sits marvelous well on her.

She told me two things of Hearst that are vastly in her favor. One