me have the prize, because I was so wild-appearing
... because I was known as having been a tramp. And because seniors and
students of correct standing at the university had tried. And it would
not be good for the school morale to let me have what I had won.

They compromised by declaring the prize off.

A year after, Professor Black, assistant professor in English
literature, who served on the judging board, told me confidentially of
this ... though he declared that he had fought for me, alleging how I
needed the money, and how I had honestly won the award.

I thought of the couplet of Gay:

"He who would without malice pass his days
Must live obscure and never merit praise."

* * * * *

Outwardly I maintained a bold and courageous rudeness. Inwardly a panic
had swept over me ... not the panic of deep solitude when a man is alone
at night in a boundless forest ... I have known that, too, but it is
nothing to that which comes to a man who knows all society, by its very
structure, arrayed against him and his dreams.

When the ancient Egyptians had finished the building of a pyramid, they
began polishing it at the top, proceeding downward. And it has been said
that on the finished, hard, smooth exterior even a fly would slip....

Huge, granite, towering, the regularised life appeared to me, the life
that bulked on all sides ... I saw that it was the object of education,
not to liberate the soul and mind and heart, but to reduce everything to
dead and commonplace formulae.

On all sides, so to speak, I saw Christ and Socrates and Shelley valeted
by society ... dress suits laid out for them ... carefully pressed and
creased ... which,--now dead,--it was pretended their spirits took up
and wore ... had, in fact, always worn....

* * * * *

And my mind went back to those happy days at Eos ... happy despite the
fly in the ointment....

I thought of my Southern widow, Mrs. Tighe.

"Poet," she had once said, "come to my place in the South. I have a
bungalow back of my house that you may live in ... write your poems
unmolested ... I won't be going there for awhile yet, but I will give
you a letter to the caretaker, and you can use the place. And my pantry
and ice box will be at your service ... so you'll need do nothing but
write."

Now, fed full of rebuffs, I wished I had accepted her offer. And I wrote
her, care of the Eos Artworks ... an ingenu