several things occurred of more or less
importance to the present history. They marked, for one thing, the
auspicious sprouting and rapid initial growth of Susan's literary
reputation. Her poems appeared little more than a month after she had
left us, a well-printed volume of less than a hundred pages, in a sober
green cover. I had taken a lonely sort of joy in reading and rereading
the proof; and if even a split letter escaped me, it has not yet been
brought to my attention. These poems were issued under a quiet title and
an unobtrusive pen-name, slipping into the market-place without any
preliminary puffing, and I feared they were of too fine a texture to
attract the notice that I felt they deserved. But in some respects, at
least, Susan was born under a lucky star. An unforeseen combination of
events suddenly focused public attention--just long enough to send it
into a third edition--upon this inconspicuous little book.

Concurrently with its publication, _The Puppet Booth_ opened its
doors--its door, rather--on Macdougal Street; an artistic venture quite
as marked, you would say, for early oblivion as Susan's own. The cocoon
of _The Puppet Booth_ was a small stable where a few Italian venders of
fruit and vegetables had kept their scarecrow horses and shabby carts
and handcarts. From this drab cocoon issued a mailed and militant
dragon-fly; vivid, flashing, erratic; both ugly and beautiful--and
wholly alive! For there were in Greenwich Village--as there are, it
would seem, in all lesser villages, from Florida to Oregon--certain
mourners over and enthusiasts for the art called Drama, which they
believed to be virtually extinct. Shows, it is true, hundreds of them,
were each season produced on Broadway, and some of these delighted hosts
of the affluent, sentimental, and child-like American _bourgeoisie_.
Fortunate managers, playsmiths and actors, endowed with sympathy for the
crude tastes of this _bourgeoisie_, a sympathy partly instinctive and
partly developed by commercial acumen, waxed fat with a prosperity for
which the Village could not wearily enough express its contempt.

None of these creatures, said the Village--no, not one--was a genuine
artist! The Theater, they affirmed, had been raped by the Philistines
and prostituted to sophomoric merrymakers by cynical greed. The Theater!
Why, it should be a temple, inviolably dedicated to its peculiar god.
Since the death of religion, it was perhaps the one temple wo