s he has just begun to say, "It's me," and that he
feels morally convinced that within the next year or two he will be
saying "Between you and I."

But you must not think that this peculiarity in Howard King and myself
is an acquired habit or a pose in which we take any measure of pride.
Our attitude towards those happy people who are always in fashion is one
of sincere and profound envy. I think there is nothing more wonderful
under the sun than the unknown force that impels the great majority to
begin doing the same new thing at the same time. It must be a precious
gift to feel instinctively what the right new thing is to do. A
mysterious fiat goes forth and a million women simultaneously put on
black straw hats surmounted by a cock in his pride. Another mysterious
order goes forth and two million women simultaneously begin reading the
latest novel by Robert W. Chambers. Pitiable are those in whom this
instinct is wanting and who must tag timidly behind, venturing only
where a million others have gone before. Perhaps it is, with such
people, a case of arrested development. Boys of sixteen and girls of
fourteen have supplied the poets with their greatest love stories and
direst tragedies. And there are men and women well gone into middle age
who balk and stammer in the presence of the most elementary sensation.
Perhaps at bottom it is simply a question of courage and cowardice.

In any case, being behind the times is a peculiarly unfortunate trait in
a man, who, like myself, is condemned to earn his bread in the sweat of
his fountain-pen. In what other profession must a man be so emphatically
up to the minute as in this scribbling profession of ours? Only
yesterday I walked into an editor's office and suggested a
three-thousand word review of "The Rise of Silas Lapham," which I told
him was one of the greatest novels in any language. He stared at me and
asked if I hadn't some fresher book in mind, and I, somewhat taken
aback, told him that I was just finishing Frank Norris's "McTeague" and
was about to begin on Mrs. Wharton's "House of Mirth." With a brutality
characteristic of editors he asked me whether I didn't care to write a
review of Homer's Iliad and the book of Deuteronomy. I told him that I
might very well do so if it were a question of writing something he
would find personally instructive, and rose to go, with the intention of
slamming the door behind me.

But he called me back and insisted that he meant n