. Letters are regarded as a shining profit now, a
fine part of the real fruits. The teaching-relation with young minds has
shown me the wonderful values of direct contact. The class of letters
that supplies sources of human value are from men and women who are too
fine ever to lose the sense of proportion. The letters that are hardest
to answer, and which remain the longest unanswered, are from people who
have merely intellectual views; those who are holding things in their
minds with such force that their real message is obstructed. I dislike
aggressive mentality; it may be my weakness, but much-educated persons
disorder this atmosphere. They want things; they want to discuss. A man
is not free to give nor to receive when his hand or brain is occupied
with holding. I have had the choicest relations with honest criticism,
the criticism that is constructive because the spirit of it is not
criticism. Letters, however, critical or otherwise, that are heady, do
not bring the beauty that we seem to need, nor do they draw the answers
they were designed for. The pure human impulse is unmistakable.

There are letters from people who want things. Some people want things
so terribly, that the crush of it is upon their pages. I do not mean
autographs. Those who have a penchant for such matters have learned to
make reply very easy; nor do I mean those who have _habits_. There seems
to be a class of men and women who want to "do" literature for money,
and who ask such questions as, "What is the best way to approach a
publisher?" "What should a writer expect to make from his first novel?"
"Do you sell outright or on royalty, and how much should one ask on a
first book, if the arrangement is made this or that way?"

I think of such as the eighty-thousand-the-year folk. The detail of
producing the novel is second to the marketing. The world is so full of
meaning to the effect that fine work is not produced this way; and yet,
again and again, this class of writers have gotten what they want. Much
money has been made out of books by those who wrote for that. People, in
fact, who have failed at many things, have settled down in mid-life and
written books that brought much money.

But such are only incidents. They are not of consequence compared to the
driving impulse which one man or woman in a hundred follows, to write to
one who has said something that quickens the heart.... There was a
letter on the desk that day from a young woman in