ke all
Gaul, and as my business opportunities--Midas forgive them!--have all
come out of my social contacts, I'll have to begin with them. Maltby's
the golden key to the first part; Mr. Heywood Sampson, the great
old-school publisher and editor-author, is the iron key to the second;
and chance--our settling down here on the fringes of Greenwich
Village--is the skeleton key to the third.

"I seem to be getting all Gaul mixed up with Bluebeard's closets and
things, but I'll try to straighten my kinky metaphors out for you,
Jimmy, if it takes me all night. But I assume you're more or less up to
date on me, since I find you all most brazenly hand me round, and since
I wrote Phil--and got severely scolded in return; deserved it, too--all
about Maltby's patiently snubbing me as a starving author and
impatiently rushing me as a possible member for his Emancipated Order of
AEsthetic May-Flies--I call it his, for he certainly thinks of it that
way. Now--Maltby and I have not precisely quarreled, but the north wind
doth blow and we've already had snow enough to cool his enthusiasm. The
whole thing's unpleasant; but I've learned something. Result--my
occasional flutterings among the AEsthetic May-Flies grow beautifully
less. They'd cease altogether if I hadn't made friends--to call them
that--with a May-Fly or two.

"One of them's the novelist, Clifton Young, a May-Fly at heart--but
there's a strain of Honeybee in his blood somewhere. It's an unhappy
combination--all the talents and few of the virtues; but I like him in
spite of himself. For one thing, he doesn't pose; and he can _write_!
He's a lost soul, though--thinks life is a tragic farce. Almost all the
May-Flies try to think that; it's a sort of guaranty of the last
sophistication; but it's genuine with Clifton, he must have been born
thinking it. He doesn't ask for sympathy, either; if he did, I couldn't
pity him--and get jeered at wittily for my pains!

"Then there's Mona Leslie, who might have been a true Honeybee if
everybody belonging to her hadn't died too soon, leaving her hopeless
numbers of millions. Mona, for some reason, has taken a passing fancy to
me; all her fancies pass. She sings like an angel, and might have made a
career--if it had seemed worth while. It never has. Nothing has, but
vivid sensation--from ascetic religion to sloppy love; and, at thirty,
she's exhausted the whole show. So she spends her time now in a mad duel
with boredom. Poor woman! Luck