oks like the real stuff," says I. "Let's hear how it listens. Ah,
come on! Some of that last one, about scuppers, now."

With a little more urgin', Rupert reads it to me. I should call him a
good reader, too. Anyway, he can untie one of them deep, boomin' voices,
and with that long, serious face of his helpin' out the general
effect--well, it's kind of impressive. He spiels off two or three
stickfuls and then stops.

"Which way was you readin' that, backwards or forwards?" says I.

Rupert begins to stiffen up, and I hurries on with the apology. "My
mistake," says I. "I thought maybe you might have got mixed at the
start. No offense. But say, Cap'n, what's the big idea? What does it all
mean?"

In some ways Rupert is good-natured. He was then. He explains how in
this brand of verse you don't try to tell a story or anything like that.
"I am merely giving my impressions," says he. "That is all.
Interpreting my own feelings, as it were."

"Oh!" says I. "Then there's no goin' behind the returns. Who's to say
you don't feel that way? I get you now. But that ain't the kind of stuff
you can wish onto the magazines, is it?"

Which shows just how far behind the bass-drum I am. Rupert tells me the
different places where he's unloaded his pieces, most of 'em for real
money. Also, I pumps out of him how he came to get into the game. Seems
he'd been roomin' down in old Greenwich Village; just happened to drift
in among them long-haired men and short-haired girls. It turns out that
the book was a little enterprise that was being backed by Mrs. Mumford.
Yes, it's that kind of a book--so much down in advance to the Grafter
Press. You know, Mrs. Mumford always did fall for Rupert, and after
she's read one of his sea spasms in a magazine she don't lose any time
huntin' him out and renewin' their cruise acquaintance. A real poet!
Say, I can just see her playin' that up among her friends. And when she
finds he's mixin' in with all those dear, delightful Bohemians, she
insists that Rupert tow her along too.

From then on it was a common thing for her and Rupert to go browsin'
around among them garlic and red-ink joints, defyin' ptomaines and
learnin' to braid spaghetti on a fork. That was her idea of life. She
hires an apartment right off Washington Square and moves in from
Montclair for the winter. She begun to have what she called her "salon
evenings," when she collected any kind of near-celebrity she could get.

Mr. Vinton Bartle