thing, or, as the slang phrase went, "slip a few over on
him," but that of course meant nothing or something, as you choose. My
dream was really to find one or many like this youth, or a pungent kind
of realism that would be true and yet within such limits as would make
it usable. Imagine, then, my satisfaction in finding these two things,
tales that I could not only admire genuinely but that I could publish,
things that ought to have an interest for all who knew even a little
about life. True, they were ironic, cruel, but still with humor and
color, so deftly and cleanly told that they were smile-provoking. I
called him and said as much, or nearly so--a mistake, as I sometimes
think now, for art should be long--and bought them forthwith, hoping,
almost against hope, to find many more such like them.

By this time, by the way, and as I should have said before, I had still
further enlarged my staff by one art director of the most flamboyant and
erratic character, a genius of sorts, volatile, restless, emotional,
colorful, a veritable Verlaine-Baudelaire-Rops soul, who, not content to
arrange and decorate the magazine each month, must needs wish to write,
paint, compose verse and music and stage plays, as well as move in an
upper social world, _entree_ to which was his by birth. Again, there was
by now an Irish-Catholic makeup editor, a graduate of some distinguished
sectarian school, who was more interested in St. Jerome and his
_Vulgate_, as an embodiment of classic Latin, than he was in getting out
the magazine. Still he had the advantage of being interesting--"and I
learned about Horace from him." Again, there was a most interesting and
youthful and pretty, if severe, example of the Wellesley-Mt.
Holyoke-Bryn Mawr school of literary art and criticism, a most
engagingly interesting intellectual maiden, who functioned as assistant
editor and reader in an adjoining room, along with the art-director, the
makeup editor and an office boy. This very valuable and in some
respects remarkable young woman, who while holding me in proper
contempt, I fear, for my rather loose and unliterary ways, was still, as
I had suspected before employing her, as keen for something new and
vital in fiction and every other phase of the scriptic art as any one
well could be. She was ever for culling, sorting, eliminating--repression
carried to the N-th power. At first L---- cordially hated her, calling
her a "simp," a "bluff," a "la-de-da," and