us to harder endeavors. But for all this, dear sir, and despite your
continued neglect, we are a tolerably happy crew. It may be that our best
things were never published--best, because we enjoyed them most, because
they recall the happiest hours and the finest moods. They bring most
freshly to our memories the influences of books and friends and the
circumstances under which they were written. It is because we lacked the
skill to tame our sensations to our uses, the patience to do well what we
wished to do fast, that you rightly judged them unavailable. We do not
feel rebellious and we admit that you are right. Only we do not care as
much as we did, for most of us are learning to write for the love of the
writing and without an eye on the medal. With no livelihood depending,
with no compulsion of hours or subject, under the free anonymity of sure
rejection, we have worked. It has been a fine world, these hours of study
and reflection, and when we assert that one essay is our best, we are
right, for it has led us to happiness and pleasant thoughts and to an
interpretation of ourselves and the world that moves about us. In these
best moods of ours, we live and think beyond our normal powers and even
come to a distant kinship with men far greater than ourselves. Knowing
this, prudence only keeps us from snapping our fingers at you and marking
each paper, as we finish it, "rejected," without the formality of a trip
to you, and then happily beginning the next. We are learning to be
amateurs and although our names shall never be shouted from the housetops,
we shall be almost as content. Still will there be the morning hours of
study with sunlight across the floor, the winding country roads of autumn
with smells of corn-stacks and burdened vineyards, the fire-lit hours of
evening. Still shall we write in our gardens of a summer afternoon or
change the winter snowstorm that drives against our windows into the
coinage of our thoughts.

[Illustration]

We shall be independent and think and write as we please. And although we
enclose stamps for a mournful recessional, please know, dear sir, that
even as you dictate your polite note of refusal, we are hard at it with
another paper.

[Illustration]

THE CHILLY PRESENCE OF HARD-HEADED PERSONS

THE CHILLY PRESENCE OF HARD-HEADED PERSONS

It is rash business scuttling your own ship. Now as I am in a way a
practical person, which is, I take it, a diminutive state of