nd then scattered the shreds all over the room.

And watching this little festival, I thought to myself excitedly,

"I know enough about this girl!"

My retreat was so precipitate as to appear almost a flight.

"Yes," I said to myself, outside, "De Maupassant knew women. And he went
insane at forty-five."

And so my next case was a chap from Detroit, whose aim, he told me, was
no less than to make himself "by the sheer force of my will a perfect,
all-round, modern man."

It was over his case that I lost what was left of my sense of honor. For
I not only wrote him down, I kept what I had written. "Ten years from
now," I said in excuse, "I won't believe him unless he's on paper." But
having kept this, I began keeping others, until my locked drawer was
filled with the dreams and ambitions and even the loves of my confiding,
innocent friends. At last I was a writer.

What a relief when my mother wrote that my father had consented to a
second year abroad for me. In my gratitude I even grew just a trifle
homesick.

"Hadn't I better come home for the summer?" I wrote her.

"No," she replied, "we cannot afford it. I want you to keep right on
with your work. I feel so sure you are working hard and will do things I
shall be proud of."

I was not only working, but living, feeling, listening hard, under the
stimulus day and night of the tense, rich life around me. About this
time I made a friend of a gaunt, bearded Russian chap, whose dream for
years had been, like mine, to become a writer of fiction. His god had
been Turgenief. And a year ago, leaving his home, a little town near
Moscow, with forty roubles in his purse he had set out on foot with a
pack on his back to tramp the long and winding road that stretched away
two thousand miles to the distant city of Paris, the place where his
idol had lived and studied and written for so many years. Through this
young Russian pilgrim I came to know the books of some of his
countrymen, and through him I caught glimpses down into the vast,
mysterious soul of that people in the North.

Through other chaps I met those days, other deep, tremendous vistas
opened up as backgrounds for these Paris friends of mine. Half the
night, in that cafe endeared to so many youths of all nations under its
name of "The Dirty Spoon," I heard talk about all things under the sun,
talk that was a merry war of words, ideas and points of view as wide
apart as that of a Jap and a German. For every lan