he poets had idealised it, and the novelists had embalmed it in
tender phrases. It was the first time I had ever met a woman by the
name of Phyllis. It appealed to my poetic instinct. Perhaps that was
the cause of it all. And then, she was very beautiful. In the autumn
of that year we became great friends; and through her influence I began
to see beyond the portals of the mansions of the rich. Matthew Prior's
Chloes and Sir John Suckling's Euphelias lost their charms. Henceforth
my muse's name became Phyllis. I took her to the opera when I didn't
know where I was going to breakfast on the morrow. I sent her roses
and went without tobacco, a privation of which woman knows nothing.

Often I was plunged into despair at my distressed circumstances. Money
to her meant something to spend; to me it meant something to get. Her
income bothered her because she could not spend it; my income was
mortgaged a week in advance, and did not bother me at all. This was
the barrier at my lips. But her woman's intuition must have told her
that she was a part and parcel of my existence.

I had what is called a forlorn hope: a rich uncle who was a planter in
Louisiana. His son and I were his only heirs. But this old planter
had a mortal antipathy to my side of the family. When my mother, his
sister, married Alfred Winthrop in 1859, at the time when the North and
South were approaching the precipice of a civil war, he considered all
family ties obliterated. We never worried much about it. When mother
died he softened to the extent of being present at the funeral. He
took small notice of my father, but offered to adopt me if I would
assume his name. I clasped my father's hand in mine and said nothing.
The old man stared at me for a moment, then left the house. That was
the first and last time I ever saw him. Sometimes I wondered if he
would remember me in his will. This, of course, was only when I had
taken Phyllis somewhere, or when some creditor had lost patience. One
morning in January, five years after my second meeting with Phyllis, I
sat at my desk in the office. It was raining; a cold thin rain. The
window was blurred. The water in the steam-pipes went banging away. I
was composing an editorial which treated the diplomatic relations
between this country and England. The roar of Park Row distracted me.
Now and then I would go to the window and peer down on the living
stream below. A dense cloud of steam hung