not from any fear of finding it gone.
He wanted to sing, he wanted to dance; he could not believe it was he,
as he rode up the lonely length of Broadway in the cable-car, between
the wild, irregular walls of the canyon which the cable-cars have all to
themselves at the end of a summer afternoon.

He went and dined, and he thought he dined well, at a Spanish-American
restaurant, for fifty cents, with a half-bottle of California claret
included. When he came back to Broadway he was aware that it was
stiflingly hot in the pinkish twilight, but he took a cable-car again
in lack of other pastime, and the motion served the purpose of a breeze,
which he made the most of by keeping his hat off. It did not really
matter to him whether it was hot or cool; he was imparadised in weather
which had nothing to do with the temperature. Partly because he was born
to such weather, in the gayety of soul which amused some people
with him, and partly because the world was behaving as he had always
expected, he was opulently content with the present moment. But he
thought very tolerantly of the future, and he confirmed himself in the
decision he had already made, to stick to Chicago when he came back to
America. New York was very well, and he had no sentiment about Chicago;
but he had got a foothold there; he had done better with an Eastern
publisher, he believed, by hailing from the West, and he did not believe
it would hurt him with the Eastern public to keep on hailing from the
West.

He was glad of a chance to see Europe, but he did not mean to come home
so dazzled as to see nothing else against the American sky. He fancied,
for he really knew nothing, that it was the light of Europe, not its
glare that he wanted, and he wanted it chiefly on his material, so as
to see it more and more objectively. It was his power of detachment
from this that had enabled him to do his sketches in the paper with such
charm as to lure a cash proposition from a publisher when he put them
together for a book, but he believed that his business faculty had
much to do with his success; and he was as proud of that as of the book
itself. Perhaps he was not so very proud of the book; he was at least
not vain of it; he could, detach himself from his art as well as his
material.

Like all literary temperaments he was of a certain hardness, in spite of
the susceptibilities that could be used to give coloring to his work.
He knew this well enough, but he believed t