ight have attracted, providing
they could prove useful to him, but also a number of a much more
successful group in these fields, those who had already achieved repute
in a more commonplace and popular way and were therefore presumably
possessed of a following and with the power to exact a high return for
their product, and for the magazine, regardless of intrinsic merit. His
constant talk was of money, its power to attract and buy, the
significance of all things material. He now wanted the magazine to be
representative of this glowing element, and at the same time,
paradoxical as it might seem, the best that might be in literary and
artistic thought.

Naturally the thing was impossible, but he had a facile and specious
method of arguing, a most gay and in some respects magnetic personality,
far from stodgy or gross, which for a time attracted many to him. Very
briskly then indeed he proceeded to make friends with all those with
whom I had surrounded myself, to enter into long and even private
discussions with them as to the proper conduct of the magazine, to hint
quite broadly at a glorious future in which all, each one particularly
to whom he talked, was to share. Curiously, this new and (as I would
have thought) inimical personality of M---- seemed to appeal to L----
very much.

I do not claim that the result was fatal. It may even, or at least
might, have had value, combined with an older or slightly more balanced
temperament. But it seemed to me that it offered too quickly what should
have come, if at all, as the result of much effort. For in regard to the
very things L---- should have most guarded against--show and the shallow
pleasures of social and night and material life in New York--M---- was
most specious. I never knew a more intriguing and fascinating man in
this respect nor one who cared less for those he used to obtain his
unimportant ends. He had positive genius for making the gaudy and the
unworthy seem worthy and even perfect. During his earlier days there,
L---- had more than once "cursed him out" (in his absence, of course),
to use his own expressive phrase, for his middle-West trade views, as he
described them, his shabby social and material ideals, and yet, as I
could plainly see, even at that time the virus of his theories was
working. For it must be remembered that L---- was very new to New York,
very young, and never having had much of anything he was no doubt
slightly envious of the man's mate