in which I lived, I
found it cold indeed. I could afford no heat ... and, believing in
windows open, knew every searching drop in the barometer.

But never in my life was I happier, despite my secretly cherished love
for Vanna. For I assured myself in my heart of certain future fame, the
fame I had dreamed of since childhood. And I wore every hardship as an
adornment, conscious of the greatness of my cause.

Isolation; half-starvation; cold; inadequate clothing;--all counted for
the glory of poetry, as martyrs had accepted persecution and suffering
for the glory of God.

My two hours of daily work irked me. I wanted the time for my writing
and studying ... but I still continued living above the din of the shop
that I had grown accustomed to, by this time.

Rarely, when the nights were so subarctic as to be almost unbearable,
did I slip down through the skylight and seek out the comparative warmth
of the shop ... and there, on the platform where the desk stood so that
it could overlook all the store, I wrote and studied.

But Randall said this worried the night watchman too much, my appearing
and disappearing, all hours of the night. He didn't relish coming every
time to see if the store was being burglarised.

* * * * *

The outside world was beginning to notice me. My poems, two of which I
had sold to the _Century_, two to _Everybody's_, and a score to the
_Independent_, were, as soon as they appeared in those magazines,
immediately copied by the Kansas newspapers. And the Kansas City _Star_
featured a story of me at Laurel, playing up my freaks and oddities ...
but accompanied by a flattering picture that "Con" Cummins, our college
photographer, had taken.

Also I was receiving occasional letters from strangers who had read my
poems. But they were mostly letters from cranks ... or from girls very,
very young and sentimental, or on the verge of old-maidhood, who were
casting about for some escape from the narrow daily life that environed
them....

But one morning a letter came to me so scrawlingly addressed that I
marvelled at the ability of the postal authorities in deciphering it.
The writer of it hailed me as a poet of great achievement already, but
of much greater future promise.... Mr. Lephil, editor of the _National
Magazine_, for whom he was writing a serial, had showed him some of my
verse, and he must hasten to encourage me ... I puzzled long over the
writer's signatur