of America, I replied, "Very well. Get your flat. I'd
like to spend a winter in the old town anyway."

My brother took a small furnished apartment on 105th Street, and
together we camped above the tumult. It was only twelve-and-a-half feet
wide and about forty-eight long, and its furnishings were ugly, frayed
and meager, but its sitting room opened upon the sun, and there, of a
morning, I continued to write in growing content. At about noon the
actor commonly cooked a steak or a chop and boiled a pot of coffee, and
after the dishes were washed, we both merrily descended upon Broadway by
means of a Ninth Avenue elevated train. Sometimes we dined down town in
reckless luxury at one of the French restaurants, "where the tip was but
a nickel and the dinner thirty cents," but usually even our evening meal
was eaten at home.

Herne was playing an unlimited engagement at the Broadway theater and I
spent a good deal of time behind the scenes with him. His house on
Convent Avenue was a handsome mansion and on a Sunday, I often dined
there, and when we all got going the walls resounded with argument. Jim
was a great wag and a delightful story teller, but he was in deadly
earnest as a reformer, and always ready to speak on The Single Tax. He
took his art very seriously also, and was one of the best stage
directors of his day. Some of his dramatic methods were so far in
advance of his time that they puzzled or disgusted many of his patrons,
but without doubt he profoundly influenced the art of the American
stage. Men like William Gillette and Clyde Fitch quite frankly
acknowledged their indebtedness to him.

Jim and Katharine both had an exaggerated notion of my importance in the
world of art and letters, and listened to me with a respect, a
fellowship and an appreciation which increased my sense of
responsibility and inspired me to greater effort as a novelist. Together
we hammered out questions of art and economics, and planned new plays.
Those were inspiring hours to us all and we still refer to them as "the
good old Convent Avenue days!"

New York City itself was incredibly simpler and quieter than it is now,
but to me it was a veritable hell because of the appalling inequality
which lay between the palaces of the landlords and the tenements of the
proletariat. The monstrous injustice of permitting a few men to own the
land on which millions toiled for the barest living tore at my heart
strings then, as it does now, and the