ey don't know. They think that just because I chuck 'em
under the chin. I can't do this technical stuff.... Oh, _Lord_! what an
evening it'll be!... I suppose I'll go to a show. Nice, lonely city,
what?... You come from here?"

"From Pennsylvania."

"Got any folks?"

"My mother is here with me."

"That's nice. I'll take her and you to some bum two-bit vaudeville show
some night, if you'd like.... Got to show my gratitude to you for
standing my general slovenliness.... Lord! nice evening--dine at a
rotisserie with a newspaper for companion. Well--g' night and g' luck."

Una surprised her mother, when they were vivisecting the weather after
dinner, by suddenly crying all over the sofa cushions.

She knew all of Walter Babson's life from those two or three sentences
of his.

Sec. 3

Francois Villons America has a-plenty. An astonishing number of
Americans with the literary itch do contrive to make a living out of
that affliction. They write motion-picture scenarios and fiction for the
magazines that still regard detective stories as the zenith of original
art. They gather in woman-scented flats to discuss sex, or in
hard-voiced groups to play poker. They seem to find in the creation of
literature very little besides a way of evading regular office hours.
Below this stratum of people so successful that one sometimes sees their
names in print is the yearning band of young men who want to write. Just
to write--not to write anything in particular; not to express any
definite thought, but to be literary, to be Bohemian, to dance with
slim young authoresses of easy morals, and be jolly dogs and free souls.
Some of them are dramatists with unacted dramas; some of them do free
verse which is just as free as the productions of regular licensed
poets. Some of them do short stories--striking, rather biological, very
destructive of conventions. Some of them are ever so handy at all forms;
they are perennial candidates for any job as book-reviewer, dramatic
critic, or manuscript-reader, since they have the naive belief that
these occupations require neither toil nor training, and enable one to
"write on the side." Meanwhile they make their livings as sub-editors on
trade journals, as charity-workers, or as assistants to illiterate
literary agents.

To this slum of literature Walter Babson belonged. He felt that he was
an author, though none of his poetry had ever been accepted, and though
he had never got beyond the first