me that I made, I fear, but an indifferent address.

We did not have much time to talk over family affairs but it was good to
see them even for a few moments and to know that mother was slowly
regaining the use of her limbs.

Another engagement made it necessary for me to take the night train for
St. Paul and so they both went down to the station with me, and as the
time came to part I went out to the little covered buggy (which was all
the carriage my father owned) to start them off on their lonely
twelve-mile trip back to the farm. "I don't know how it is all coming
about, mother, but sometime, somewhere you and I are going to live
together,--not here, back in Osage, or perhaps in Boston. It won't be
long now."

She smiled, but her voice was tremulous. "Don't worry about me. I'm all
right again--at least I am better. I shall be happy if only you are
successful."

This meeting did me good. My mother's smile lessened my bitterness, and
her joy in me, her faith in me, sent me away in renewed determination to
rescue her from the destitution and loneliness of this arid land.

My return to Boston in November discovered a startling change in my
relationship to it. The shining city in which I had lived for seven
years, and which had become so familiar to me (and so necessary to my
progress), had begun to dwindle, to recede. The warm, broad, unkempt and
tumultuous west, with its clamorous movement, its freedom from
tradition, its vitality of political thought, re-asserted its power over
me. New England again became remote. It was evident that I had not
really taken root in Massachusetts after all. I perceived that Boston
was merely the capital of New England while New York was fast coming to
be the all-conquering capital of The Nation.

My realization of this shift of values was sharpened by the announcement
that Howells had definitely decided to move to the Metropolis, and that
Herne had broken up his little home in Ashmont and was to make his
future home on Convent Avenue in Harlem. The process of stripping Boston
to build up Manhattan had begun.

My brother who was still one of Herne's company of players in _Shore
Acres_, had no home to break up, but he said, "I'm going to get some
sort of headquarters in New York. If you'll come on we'll hire a little
apartment up town and 'bach' it. I'm sick of theatrical boarding
houses."

With suddenly acquired conviction that New York was about to become the
Literary Center