“Oh no,” he answered, “Mansfield found a coat of mine he liked the looks of and I cut it over to fit him.”
Tark. thinks so artistically and so cleverly. Here is a quotation from a letter written to me in 1914. He tells about Arnold Bennett criticizing the writing of a well-known author as being “too adult,” then goes on to say:
“Adults make everybody uncomfortable; they want to. Most of the surprises saved for the startling tags of stories by Guy de Maupassant and O. Henry are merely little bursts of naturalness—some boyish thing. We recognize the truth of them at sight—and are surprised for the reason that a boy or an artist always catches us off our guard.”
There was a galaxy of playwrights, among them Bronson Howard and Clyde Fitch, now gone as is that dear, kindly, clever man, William Dean Howells—one ever to be missed. I dined somewhere beside a charming girl, and the conversation drifted to the usual topic—marriage. I noticed across the table, just opposite me, the head of Mr. Howells twisting to right and left and trying to follow our talk, so I said rather maliciously:
“One of our cleverest writers has said, ‘Man, even after eighteen hundred years of Christianity, is only imperfectly monogamous.’”
Applause from across the table. “Oh, that is fine, Simmons! Do you remember who said it?”
“Why, I found it in a book I have just been reading, called Indian Summer.”
He suddenly drew back behind the flowers. “Oh, really!”
A few days afterward a short figure crowded up to me in the elevator of a large building with an: “Oh, Simmons, I looked that up. I did say it.”
Kipling was not a member of The Players, on account of his book about the United States. He was not well known when he first came here, and no one was prophet enough to guess that he was to become the greatest name in English of his time. Many of the older men would not “stand for” his criticism of America. I heard old Edward Bell burst forth to Edwin Booth: