he is starting
out to do and the fact that life will give him slaps and to spare before
he is many years older, he needs to be encouraged. I was like that
myself not so long ago. And besides, if I do not encourage this type of
work financially (which is the best way of all), who will?"

About a week later I was given another and still more gratifying
surprise, for one day, in his usual condescending manner, he brought to
me two short pieces of fiction and laid them most gingerly on my desk
with scarcely a word--"Here was something I might read if I chose," I
believe. The reading of these two stories gave me as much of a start as
though I had discovered a fully developed genius. They were so truly new
or different in their point of view, so very clear, incisive, brief,
with so much point in them (_The Second Motive_; _The Right Man_). For
by then having been struggling with the short-story problem in other
magazine offices before this, I had become not a little pessimistic as
to the trend of American short fiction, as well as long--the
impossibility of finding any, even supposing it publishable once we had
it. My own experience with "Sister Carrie" as well as the fierce
opposition or chilling indifference which, as I saw, overtook all those
who attempted anything even partially serious in America, was enough to
make me believe that the world took anything even slightly approximating
the truth as one of the rankest and most criminal offenses possible. One
dared not "talk out loud," one dared not report life as it was, as one
lived it. And one of the primary warnings I had received from the
president of this very organization--a most eager and ambitious and
distressing example of that American pseudo-morality which combines a
pirate-like acquisitiveness with an inward and absolute conviction of
righteousness--was that while he wanted something new in fiction,
something more virile and life-like than that "mush," as he
characterized it, to be found in the current magazines, still (1), it
must have a strong appeal for the general reader (!); and (2), be very
compelling in fact and _clean_, as the dear general reader would of
course understand that word--a solid little pair of millstones which
would unquestionably end in macerating everything vital out of any good
story.

Still I did not despair; something might be done. And though I sighed, I
hoped to be able to make my superior stretch a point in favor of the
exceptional