to eleven, and this being a time of holiday, R. H.
D. emerges from his workroom happy to think that he has placed one
hundred and seven words between himself and the wolf who hangs about
every writer's door. He isn't satisfied with those hundred and seven
words. He never was in the least satisfied with anything that he
wrote, but he has searched his mind and his conscience and he believes
that under the circumstances they are the very best that he can do.
Anyway, they can stand in their present order until--after lunch.

"A sign of his youth was the fact that to the day of his death he had
denied himself the luxury and slothfulness of habits. I have never
seen him smoke automatically as most men do. He had too much respect
for his own powers of enjoyment and for the sensibilities, perhaps, of
the best Havana tobacco. At a time of his own deliberate choosing,
often after many hours of hankering and renunciation, he smoked his
cigar. He smoked it with delight, with a sense of being rewarded, and
he used all the smoke there was in it.

"He dearly loved the best food, the best champagne, and the best Scotch
whiskey. But these things were friends to him, and not enemies. He
had toward food and drink the continental attitude; namely, that
quality is far more important than quantity; and he got his
exhilaration from the fact that he was drinking champagne and not from
the champagne. Perhaps I shall do well to say that on questions of
right and wrong he had a will of iron. All his life he moved
resolutely in whichever direction his conscience pointed; and although
that ever present and never obtrusive conscience of his made mistakes
of judgment now and then, as must all consciences, I think it can never
once have tricked him into any action that was impure or unclean. Some
critics maintain that the heroes and heroines of his books are
impossibly pure and innocent young people. R. H. D. never called upon
his characters for any trait of virtue, or renunciation, or
self-mastery of which his own life could not furnish examples."

In June of 1912 Richard reported the Republican convention at Chicago.
Shortly after this, on July 8, he married at Greenwich, Connecticut,
Miss Elizabeth Genevieve McEvoy, known on the stage as Bessie McCoy,
with whom he had first become acquainted in 1908 after the estrangement
from his wife.

Richard and his wife made their home at Crossroads, where he devoted
most of his working hours