ll speak for us next Sunday at eight
o'clock. Come and bring all your friends."

"You are in for it now," laughed my brother gleefully. "You'll be lined
up with the anarchists sure!"

That evening was in a very real sense a parting of the ways for me. To
refuse this call was to go selfishly and comfortably along the lines of
literary activity I had chosen. To accept was to enter the arena where
problems of economic justice were being sternly fought out. I understood
already something of the disadvantage which attached to being called a
reformer, but my sense of duty and the influence of Herbert Spencer and
Walt Whitman rose above my doubts. I decided to do my part.

All the week I agonized over my address, and on Sunday spoke to a
crowded house with a kind of partisan success. On Monday my good friend
Chamberlin, _The Listener_ of _The Transcript_ filled his column with a
long review of my heretical harangue.--With one leap I had reached the
lime-light of conservative Boston's disapproval!

Chamberlin, himself a "philosophical anarchist," was pleased with the
individualistic note which ran through my harangue. The Single Taxers
were of course, delighted for I admitted my discipleship to George, and
my socialistic friends urged that the general effect of my argument was
on their side. Altogether, for a penniless student and struggling story
writer, I created something of a sensation. All my speeches thereafter
helped to dye me deeper than ever with the color of reform.

However, in the midst of my Anti-Poverty Campaign, I did not entirely
forget my fiction and my teaching. I was becoming more and more a
companion of artists and poets, and my devotion to things literary
deepened from day to day. A dreadful theorist in some ways, I was, after
all, more concerned with literary than with social problems. Writing was
my life, land reform one of my convictions.

High in my attic room I bent above my manuscript with a fierce resolve.
From eight o'clock in the morning until half past twelve, I dug and
polished. In the afternoon, I met my classes. In the evening I revised
what I had written and in case I did not go to the theater or to a
lecture (I had no social engagements) I wrote until ten o'clock. For
recreation I sometimes drove with Dr. Cross on his calls or walked the
lanes and climbed the hills with my brother.

In this way most of my stories of the west were written. Happy in my own
work, I bitterly resented the l