y, to visit Shelby's
apartment--diggings, Shelby always called them. There, on the walls, he
told us, were innumerable photographs of Miss Davis, in every
conceivable pose. They looked out at one from delicate and heavy frames;
and some were stuck informally in the mirror of his dresser, as though
casually placed there to lighten up the beginning of each day, or
perhaps because there was no other space for them.

"You must know her awfully well," Stanton ventured once.

"I have never met the lady," was all Shelby said; and Stanton told me
there was a sigh that followed the remark.

"What!" this full-blooded young American reporter cried, astounded.
"You've never met this girl, and yet you have all these--all these
pictures of her?"

"I don't want to lose my dream, my illusion," was Shelby's answer.

A man who would not meet the toast of Broadway--and Fifth Avenue, for
that matter--if he could, was, to Stanton and the rest of us,
inconceivable.

It was at the close of that winter that Shelby left us. Some there were
who said he was suffering from a broken heart. At any rate, he began to
free-lance; and the first of those fascinating romantic short stories
that he did so well appeared in one of the magazines. There was always a
poignant note in them. They dealt with lonely men who brooded in secret
on some unattainable woman of dreams. This sounds precious; but the
tales were saved from utter banality by a certain richness of style, a
flow and fervour that carried the reader on through twenty pages without
his knowing it. They struck a fresh note, they were filled with the fire
of youth, and the scenes were always laid in some far country, which
gave them, oddly enough, a greater reality. Shelby could pile on
adjectives as no other writer of his day, I always thought, and he could
weave a tapestry, or create an embroidery of words that was almost
magical.

He made a good deal of money, I believe, during those first few months
after he went away from Herald Square. Apparently he had no friends,
and, as I have said, invariably he seemed to dine alone at Mouqin's, at
a corner table. Afterwards, he would go around to the Cafe Martin, then
in its glory, where Fifth Avenue and Broadway meet, for his coffee and a
golden liqueur and a cigarette. That flaming room, which we who were
fortunate enough to have our youth come to a glorious fruition in 1902,
attracted us all like a magnet. Here absinthe dripped into tall glasse