, a boutonniere--all this in hard, smoky, noisy, commercial
St. Louis, full of middle-West business men and farmers!

I would not mention this particular person save that for a time he,
Peter and myself were most intimately associated. We temporarily
constituted in our way a "soldiers three" of the newspaper world. For
some years after we were more or less definitely in touch as a group,
although later Peter and myself having drifted Eastward and hob-nobbing
as a pair had been finding more and more in common and had more and more
come to view Dick for what he was: a character of Dickensian, or perhaps
still better, Cruikshankian, proportions and qualities. But in those
days the three of us were all but inseparable; eating, working, playing,
all but sleeping together. I had a studio of sorts in a more or less
dilapidated factory section of St. Louis (Tenth near Market; now I
suppose briskly commercial), Dick had one at Broadway and Locust,
directly opposite the then famous Southern Hotel. Peter lived with his
family on the South Side, a most respectable and homey-home
neighborhood.

It has been one of my commonest experiences, and one of the most
interesting to me, to note that nearly all of my keenest experiences
intellectually, my most gorgeous _rapprochements_ and swiftest
developments mentally, have been by, to, and through men, not women,
although there have been several exceptions to this. Nearly every
turning point in my career has been signalized by my meeting some man of
great force, to whom I owe some of the most ecstatic intellectual hours
of my life, hours in which life seemed to bloom forth into new aspects,
glowed as with the radiance of a gorgeous tropic day.

Peter was one such. About my own age at this time, he was blessed with a
natural understanding which was simply Godlike. Although, like myself,
he was raised a Catholic and still pretending in a boisterous,
Rabelaisian way to have some reverence for that faith, he was amusingly
sympathetic to everything good, bad, indifferent--"in case there might
be something in it; you never can tell." Still he hadn't the least
interest in conforming to the tenets of the church and laughed at its
pretensions, preferring his own theories to any other. Apparently
nothing amused him so much as the thought of confession and communion,
of being shrived by some stout, healthy priest as worldly as himself,
and preferably Irish, like himself. At the same time he had a he