“No, my dear young woman. I don’t say that educated people have a monopoly of knowledge, but they are the only ones that know how to use it.”
“Then it’s only the thoughts of educated people for your magazine,” I cried disappointedly. “How about people like me with a lot to say but can’t put it in fancy language? Isn’t your new school to be different from the old colleges in that you want to bring out the new thoughts of new people like me? Wouldn’t you want to give a person like me a chance in your magazine?”
“But can you express yourself logically, reasonably?”
“Logic—reason! Reason—logic!” I jumped from the chair with excitement. “That’s why your magazine is so dull, so dead, because all your living thoughts die down in the ashes of dead logic. Reason and logic aren’t life. Hunger and desire are life. I know, because I’m burning up with it. With this hunger they paint pictures and write books and sing songs——”
“You Russians are full of interesting stuff. But you’re so incoherent. You’d be no use to us unless you could learn to think clearly.”
“I know my thoughts are all mixed up,” I pleaded with educated quietness, “but it’s only because I have so much to give and nobody wants it. Wouldn’t it be better for your magazine to have my mixed-up aliveness instead of the cold logic from your college writers?”
He smiled down pityingly on me.
“I’m afraid that such a chaotic mind as yours would be useless to an intellectual journal. Good day.”
Not crushed, but bitter and hard and with head high, I walked out of The Reformer office. Were all the magazines that set themselves up to save the world headed by such narrow-thinking tsars? Only to prove that all of them were run by some clique of college professors, I went to the office of The People.
Here the editor didn’t run from me like a frightened rabbit or sting me with logic like John Blair. He cut short the interview by going over to the shelf and taking down a book which he handed to me with pitying kindness. “This will help you to think and maybe to write.”