and brings 'em out and holds 'em up and says, 'Here! This
is you, this is what you want, this is what you believe in!'--your crowd
says, 'Sure! Why didn't we see it long ago?' And then they do things that
go into headlines! But to be able to write like that a man can't go
chasing all over the earth, he's got to quit sneering at art and
technique, he's got to learn how to make characters real and build plots
that make readers sit up all night to see what becomes of the people
he's made! If believing that is a creed, then I'm creedy! I'm willing to
throw over everything else, but I'll hang on to this one thing all my
life--the fact that big art means working like hell!"

"Gee," said J. K. "What an artist."

These fights of ours left me weak and sore, as though I'd been back on
the terrace at home, listening to my father talk and looking at his
harbor.

CHAPTER XII

When Joe left me in peace at last, just for the sake of the rest and
change I turned my attention to music, or, rather, to a musical friend,
a young Bohemian composer who lived wholly in a world of his own. I
explored this musical world of his, by his side in dark top galleries,
in the Cafe Rouge on concert nights, in his room at his piano. How
deliciously far away from hay was this chap's feeling for Mozart. With
him I could feel sure of myself, of the way I was living for my art, of
what my mother way back at the start had called the "fine things" in
humanity.

I remember the night we heard "Boheme" from the gallery of the Opera
Comique. I remember the talk we had late that night, and my walk by the
edge of the Gardens home--and the letter and the cable that I found
waiting on my desk. The letter was from my father and told me that my
mother was dying. The cable told me she was dead.

I remember learning that letter by heart on that long ocean voyage home.
This was no sudden illness, I learned, my mother had known of it while I
was home, known that she had it and that it was fatal. That was the news
she had told my father alone that night on the terrace! That was why she
had been so eager to get me away to Paris; that was why she had kept me
abroad!

"She did not want you to see how she looked," my father wrote. "She
wanted you to remember her always as she was when you saw her last."

I remembered her now. What a young beast I had been to forget her, to
drop her so utterly out of my thoughts in that selfish happy Paris life,
when it was she