ding--or at least one not vulgar or low--whereas my
idea in connection with L----, gifted as he was, was that he should
confine himself to fiction as an art and without any regard to theories
or types of ending, believing, as I did, that he would definitely
establish himself in that way in the long run. I had no objection of
course to experiences of various kinds, his taking up with any line of
work which might seem at the moment far removed from realistic writing,
providing always that the star of his ideal was in sight. Whenever he
wrote, be it early or late, it must be in the clear, incisive,
uncompromising vein of these first stories and with that passion for
revelation which characterized him at first, that same unbiased and
unfettered non-moral viewpoint.

But after meeting with and working for M---- under this new arrangement
and being apparently fascinated for the moment by his personality, he
seemed to me to gradually lose sight of his ideal, to be actually taken
in by the plausible arguments which the latter could spin with the ease
that a spider spins gossamer. In that respect I insist that M---- was a
bad influence. Under his tutelage L---- gradually became, for instance,
an habitue of a well-known and pseudo-bohemian chop-house, a most
mawkish and naively imitative affair, intended frankly to be a copy or
even the original, forsooth, of an old English inn, done, in so far as
its woodwork was concerned, in smoked or dark-stained oak to represent
an old English interior, its walls covered with long-stemmed pipes and
pictures of English hunting and drinking scenes, its black-stained but
unvarnished tables littered with riding, driving and country-life
society papers, to give it that air of _sans ceremonie_ with an upper
world of which its habitues probably possessed no least inkling but most
eagerly craved. Here, along with a goodly group of his latter-day
friends, far different from those by whom he had first been
surrounded--a pretentious society poet of no great merit but
considerable self-emphasis, a Wall Street broker, posing as a club man,
_raconteur_, "first-nighter" and what not, and several young and
ambitious playwrights, all seeking the heaven of a Broadway success--he
began to pose as one of the intimates of the great city, its bosom child
as it were, the cynosure and favorite of its most glittering
precincts--a most M-----like proceeding. His clothes by now, for I saw
him on occasion, had taken on