to him "all right," someone who had made
marked sacrifices for him.

She had once "run" a restaurant in a Western mining camp, had then or
later carried him as a puling baby under her shawl or cloak across the
Mojave Desert, on foot a part of the way. Apparently he did not know who
his father was, and he was not very much concerned to know whether she
did or not. His father had died, he said, when he was a baby. Later his
mother, then a cook in some railroad hotel in Texas, had sent him to
school there. Later still she had been a "bawler out," if you know what
that means, an employee of a loan shark and used by him to compel
delinquent, albeit petty and pathetic, creditors to pay their dues or
then and there, before all their fellow-workers, be screamed at for
their delinquency about the shop in which they worked! Later she became
a private detective! an insurance agent--God knows what--a kind of rough
man-woman, as she turned out to be, but all the while clinging to this
boy, her pet, no doubt her dream of perfection. She had by turns sent
him to common and high school and to college, remitting him such sums of
money as she might to pay his way. Later still (at that very time in
fact) she was seeking to come to New York to keep house for him, only
he would not have that, perhaps sensing the need of greater freedom. But
he wrote her regularly, as he confessed to me, and in later years I
believe sent her a part of his earnings, which were to be saved by her
for him against a rainy day. Among his posthumous writings later I found
a very lovely story ("His Mother"), describing her and himself in
unsparing and yet loving terms, a compound of the tender and the brutal
in his own soul.

The thing that always made me hope for the best was that at that time he
was not at all concerned with the petty little _moralic_ and economic
definitions and distinctions which were floating about his American
world in one form and another. Indeed he seemed to be entirely free of
and even alien to them. What he had heard about the indwelling and
abiding perfections of the human soul had gone, and rightly so, in one
ear and out the other. He respected the virtues, but he knew of and
reckoned with die antipathetic vices which gave them their reason for
being. To him the thief was almost as important as the saint, the reason
for the saint's being. And, better still, he had not the least interest
in American politics or society--a wonderful sign