. The American dream of
"getting ahead" financially and socially was not part of him--another
mark royal. All life was fascinating, acceptable, to be interpreted if
one had the skill; it was a great distinction to have the skill--worth
endless pains to acquire it.

But how unwilling would the average American of his day have been,
stuffed as he was and still is with book and picture drivel about
artists and art, to accept L---- as anything more than a raw, callow
yokel, presuming to assail the outer portals of the temple with his
muddy feet! A romping, stamping, irritable soul, with more the air of a
young railroad brakeman or "hand," than an artist, and with so much
coarse language at times and such brutality of thought as to bar him
completely, one might say, from having anything to do with great
fiction, great artistic conceptions, or the temple of art. What, sit
with the mighty!--that coarse youth, with darkish-brown hair parted at
one side and combed over one ear, in the manner of a grandiose barber;
with those thick-soled and none too shapely brown shoes, that none too
well-made store suit of clothes, that little round brown hat, more
often a cap, pulled rather savagely and vulgarly, even insultingly, over
one eye; that coarse frieze overcoat, still worn on cold spring days,
its "corners" back and front turned up by the damp and from being
indifferently sat on; that brash corn-cob pipe and bag of cheap tobacco,
extracted and lit at odd moments; what, that youth with the aggressive,
irritating vibrant manner--almost the young tough with a chip on his
shoulder looking for one to even so much as indicate that he is not all
he should be! Positively, there was something brutal and yet cosmic (not
comic) about him, his intellectual and art pretensions considered. At
times his waspishness and bravado palled even on me. He was too
aggressive, too forceful, too intolerant, I said. He should be softer.
At other times I felt that he needed to be all that and more to "get
by," as he would have said. I wanted to modify him a little--and yet I
didn't--and I remained drawn to him in spite of many irritating little
circumstances, all but infuriating at times, and actually calculated, it
seemed, with a kind of savage skill to reduce what he conceived to be my
lofty superiority. At times I thought he ought to be killed--like a
father meditating on an unruly son--but the mood soon passed and his
literary ability made amends for ever