it all, but I
knew that I wasn't getting on a bit. I have come to the conclusion that
one year of newspapering counts for two years of ordinary, existence,
and that while I'm twenty-eight in the family Bible I'm fully forty
inside. When one day may bring under one's pen a priest, a pauper,
a prostitute, a philanthropist, each with a story to tell, and each
requiring to be bullied, or cajoled, or bribed, or threatened, or
tricked into telling it; then the end of that day's work finds one
looking out at the world with eyes that are very tired and as old as the
world itself.

I'm spoiled for sewing bees and church sociables and afternoon bridges.
A hunger for the city is upon me. The long, lazy summer days have
slipped by. There is an autumn tang in the air. The breeze has a touch
that is sharp.

Winter in a little northern town! I should go mad. But winter in the
city! The streets at dusk on a frosty evening; the shop windows arranged
by artist hands for the beauty-loving eyes of women; the rows of lights
like jewels strung on an invisible chain; the glitter of brass
and enamel as the endless procession of motors flashes past; the
smartly-gowned women; the keen-eyed, nervous men; the shrill note of the
crossing policeman's whistle; every smoke-grimed wall and pillar taking
on a mysterious shadowy beauty in the purple dusk, every unsightly blot
obscured by the kindly night. But best of all, the fascination of
the People I'd Like to Know. They pop up now and then in the shifting
crowds, and are gone the next moment, leaving behind them a vague
regret. Sometimes I call them the People I'd Like to Know and sometimes
I call them the People I Know I'd Like, but it means much the same.
Their faces flash by in the crowd, and are gone, but I recognize them
instantly as belonging to my beloved circle of unknown friends.

Once it was a girl opposite me in a car--a girl with a wide, humorous
mouth, and tragic eyes, and a hole in her shoe. Once it was a big,
homely, red-headed giant of a man with an engineering magazine sticking
out of his coat pocket. He was standing at a book counter reading
Dickens like a schoolboy and laughing in all the right places, I
know, because I peaked over his shoulder to see. Another time it was
a sprightly little, grizzled old woman, staring into a dazzling shop
window in which was displayed a wonderful collection of fashionably
impossible hats and gowns. She was dressed all in rusty black, was the