ng the receipt from Paris of news of the appearance at the
Theatre Francais of an actress, Madame Judith, who was formidably to
compete with her coreligionary Rachel and to endanger that artist's
laurels. Why should Madame Judith's name have stuck to me through all
the years, since I was never to see her and she is as forgotten as
Rachel is remembered? Why should that scrap of gossip have made a date
for my consciousness, turning it to the Comedie with an intensity that
was long afterwards to culminate? Why was it equally to abide for me
that the same gentleman had on one of these occasions mentioned his
having just come back from a wonderful city of the West, Chicago, which,
though but a year or two old, with plank sidewalks when there were any,
and holes and humps where there were none, and shanties where there were
not big blocks, and everything where there had yesterday been nothing,
had already developed a huge energy and curiosity, and also an appetite
for lectures? I became aware of the Comedie, I became aware of Chicago;
I also became aware that even the most alluring fiction was not always
for little boys to read. It was mentioned at the Tribune office that one
of its reporters, Mr. Solon Robinson, had put forth a novel rather oddly
entitled "Hot Corn" and more or less having for its subject the career
of a little girl who hawked that familiar American luxury in the
streets. The volume, I think, was put into my father's hand, and I
recall my prompt desire to make acquaintance with it no less than the
remark, as promptly addressed to my companion, that the work, however
engaging, was not one that should be left accessible to an innocent
child. The pang occasioned by this warning has scarcely yet died out for
me, nor my sense of my first wonder at the discrimination--so great
became from that moment the mystery of the tabooed book, of whatever
identity; the question, in my breast, of why, if it was to be so right
for others, it was only to be wrong for me. I remember the soreness of
the thought that it was I rather who was wrong for the book--which was
somehow humiliating: in that amount of discredit one couldn't but be
involved. Neither then nor afterwards was the secret of "Hot Corn"
revealed to me, and the sense of privation was to be more prolonged, I
fear, than the vogue of the tale, which even as a success of scandal
couldn't have been great.

VII

Dimly queer and "pathetic" to me were to remain th