or leaving it and various
debts beside, and would take refuge in some shabby tenement, or rear
rooms even, and where, touched by remorse or encouraged by the great
literary and art traditions (Balzac, Baudelaire, Johnson, Goldsmith,
Verlaine) he would toil unendingly at definite money-yielding
manuscripts, the results of which carried to some well-paying
_successful magazine_ would yield him sufficient to return to the white
lights--often even to take a better apartment than that which last had
been his. By now, however, one of the two children he eventually left
behind him had been born. His domestic cares were multiplying, the
marriage idea dull. Still he did not hesitate to continue those dinners
given to his friends, the above-mentioned group or its spiritual kin,
either in his apartment or in a bohemian restaurant of great show in New
York. In short, he was a fairly successful short-story writer and critic
in whom still persisted a feeling that he would yet triumph in the
adjacent if somewhat more difficult field of popular fiction.

It was during this period, if I may interpolate an incident, that I was
waiting one night in a Broadway theater lobby for a friend to appear,
when who should arrive on the scene but L----, most outlandishly dressed
in what I took to be a _reductio ad absurdum_ of his first pose, as I
now half-feared it to be: that of the uncouth and rugged young American,
disclaiming style in dress at least, and content to be a clod in looks
so long as he was a Shelley in brains. His suit was of that coarse
ill-fitting character described as Store, and shelf-worn; his shoes all
but dusty brogans, his headgear a long-visored yellowish-and-brown
cross-barred cap. He had on a short, badly-cut frieze overcoat, his
hands stuck defiantly in his trousers pockets, forcing its lapels wide
open. And he appeared to be partially if not entirely drunk, and very
insolent. I had the idea that the drunkenness and the dress were a pose,
or else that he had been in some neighborhood in search of copy which
required such an outfit. Charitably let us accept the last. He was
accompanied by two satellic souls who were doing their best to restrain
him.

"Come, now! Don't make a scene. We'll see the show all right!"

"Sure we'll see the show!" he returned contentiously. "Where's the
manager?"

A smug mannikin whose uniform was a dress suit, the business manager
himself, eyed him in no friendly spirit from a nearby corner