fine
shadings, the music and color of words and of phrases. How much more
pliant and smooth and brilliant than English. How remote from the
harbor.

I could study my models now, not only their construction but their small
character touches as well. De Maupassant was still first for me. So
simple and sure, with so few strokes but each stroke counting to the
full, one suggestive sentence making you imagine the rest, everything
else in the world shut out, your mind gripped suddenly and held,
focussed on this man and this woman who a moment before had been nothing
to you but were now more real than life itself. Especially this woman,
what an absorbing creature he made her--and the big human ideas he
injected into these petites histoires.

I wrote short stories by the score. Each one had a perfectly huge idea
but each seemed worse than the one before. I took to myself the advice
of Flaubert, and from a table before a cafe I would watch the people
around me and jot down the minutest details, I filled whole pages with
my strokes. But which to choose to make this person or this scene like
no other in the world? There came the rub. How had De Maupassant done
it? The answer came to me one night:

"Not only by watching people. He talked to 'em, lived with 'em, knew
their lives!"

The very thing my music teacher had said about Beethoven. How uneasy I
had been then, how absurdly young and priggish then in the gingerly way
I had gone at the harbor. Thank heaven there was no harbor here. I could
enter this life with a wholehearted zest.

I began with one of my roommates. He was to be an architect. A
hard-working little chap, his days were filled with sharp suspense. The
Beaux Arts entrance examinations were close ahead. If he did not pass,
he told me, his parents in Ohio were too poor to give him another
chance.

"If I have to go back to Ohio now," he said in that soft reflective
voice of his, "I'll put up cowsheds--later on, barns--and maybe when I'm
fifty, a moving picture theater. If I stay here and go back a Beaux Arts
man, I can go to New York or Chicago and get right into the center of
the big things being done."

With a wet towel bound around his head he used to sit at his work half
the night. I watched the lines tighten about his thin lips and between
his gray eyes, grew to know the long weariness in them over some
problem, the sudden grim joy when the problem worked out. One day he
came home early.

"Queer," he sa