of my time! You're like all the rest
of them: you talk big, but you really don't want anything very
important. You want little things probably, written to a theory or down
to 'our policy.' I know. Give me the stuff. You don't have to take it.
It was ordered, but I'll throw it in the waste basket."

"Not so fast! Not so fast!" I replied, admiring his courage and moved by
his contempt of the editorial and book publishing conditions in America.
He was so young and raw and savage in his way, quite animal, and yet how
interesting! There was something as fresh and clean about him as a newly
plowed field or the virgin prairies. He typified for me all the young
unsophisticated strength of my country, but with more "punch" than it
usually manifests, in matters intellectual at least. "Now, don't get
excited, and don't snarl," I cooed. "I know what you say is true. They
don't really want much of what you have to offer. I don't. Working for
some one else, as most of us do, for the dear circulation department,
it's not possible for us to get very far above crowd needs and tastes.
I've been in your position exactly. I am now. Where do you come from?"

He told me--Missouri--and some very few years before from its state
university.

"And what is it you want to do?"

"What's that to you?" he replied irritatingly, with an ingrowing and
obvious self-conviction of superiority and withdrawing as though he
highly resented my question as condescending and intrusive. "You
probably wouldn't understand if I told you. Just now I want to write
enough magazine stuff to make a living, that's all."

"Dear, dear!" I said, laughing at the slap. "What a bravo we are!
Really, you're interesting. But suppose now you and I get down to brass
tacks. You want to do something interesting, if you can, and get paid
for it. I rather like you, and anyhow you look to me as though you might
do the things I want, or some of them. Now, you want to do the least
silly thing you can--something better than this. I want the least silly
stuff I can get away with in this magazine--genuine color out of the
life of New York, if such a thing can be published in an ordinary
magazine. Roughly, here's the kind of thing I want," and I outlined to
him the probable policy of the magazine under my direction. I had taken
an anaemic "white-light" monthly known as _The Broadway_ (!) and was
attempting to recast it into a national or international metropolitan
picture. He thawed sli