r Ysaye play and Melba sing, or to see Mansfield or Henry Irving,
when we have had them? And do you think you've been quite fair to Tom?
What right had you to assume that he had forgotten you?"

"Oh, I didn't exactly mean forgotten," he said, pulling a blade of grass
to and fro between his fingers, staring at it absently. "It's only that
I have dropped out of the world, you know. I kept track of every one,
saw most of my friends, or corresponded, now and then, for a year or so
after I left college; but people don't miss you much after a while.
They rather expected me to do a lot of things, in a way, you know, and
I wasn't doing them. I was glad to get away. I always had an itch for
newspaper work, and I went on a New York paper. Maybe it was the wrong
paper; at least, I wasn't fit for it. There was something in the side
of life I saw, too, not only on the paper, that made me heart-sick; and
then the rush and fight and scramble to be first, to beat the other man.
Probably I am too squeamish. I saw classmates and college friends diving
into it, bound to come out ahead, dear old, honest, frank fellows, who
had been so happy-go-lucky and kind and gay, growing too busy to meet
and be good to any man who couldn't be good to them, asking (more
delicately) the eternal question, 'What does it get me?' You might think
I bad-met with unkindness; but it was not so; it was the other way more
than I deserved. But the cruel competition, the thousands fighting for
places, the multitude scrambling for each ginger-bread baton, the cold
faces on the streets--perhaps it's all right and good; of course it has
to _be_--but I wanted to get out of it, though I didn't want to come
_here_. That was chance. A new man bought the paper I was working for,
and its policy changed. Many of the same men still wrote for it, facing
cheerfully about and advocating a tricky theory, vehement champions of a
set of personal schemers and waxy images."

He spoke with feeling; but now, as though a trifle ashamed of too much
seriousness, and justifiably afraid of talking like one of his own
editorials, he took a lighter tone. "I had been taken on the paper
through a friend and not through merit, and by the same undeserved,
kindly influence, after a month or so I was set to writing short
political editorials, and was at it nearly two years. When the paper
changed hands the new proprietor indicated that he would be willing to
have me stay and write the other way. I