"I know enough about this girl!"
My retreat was so precipitate as to appear almost a flight.
"Yes," I said to myself, outside, "De Maupassant knew women. And he went insane at forty-five."
And so my next case was a chap from Detroit, whose aim, he told me, was no less than to make himself "by the sheer force of my will a perfect, all-round, modern man."
It was over his case that I lost what was left of my sense of honor. For I not only wrote him down, I kept what I had written. "Ten years from now," I said in excuse, "I won't believe him unless he's on paper." But having kept this, I began keeping others, until my locked drawer was filled with the dreams and ambitions and even the loves of my confiding, innocent friends. At last I was a writer.
What a relief when my mother wrote that my father had consented to a second year abroad for me. In my gratitude I even grew just a trifle homesick.
"Hadn't I better come home for the summer?" I wrote her.
"No," she replied, "we cannot afford it. I want you to keep right on with your work. I feel so sure you are working hard and will do things I shall be proud of."
I was not only working, but living, feeling, listening hard, under the stimulus day and night of the tense, rich life around me. About this time I made a friend of a gaunt, bearded Russian chap, whose dream for years had been, like mine, to become a writer of fiction. His god had been Turgenief. And a year ago, leaving his home, a little town near Moscow, with forty roubles in his purse he had set out on foot with a pack on his back to tramp the long and winding road that stretched away two thousand miles to the distant city of Paris, the place where his idol had lived and studied and written for so many years. Through this young Russian pilgrim I came to know the books of some of his countrymen, and through him I caught glimpses down into the vast, mysterious soul of that people in the North.
Through other chaps I met those days, other deep, tremendous vistas opened up as backgrounds for these Paris friends of mine. Half the night, in that café endeared to so many youths of all nations under its name of "The Dirty Spoon," I heard talk about all things under the sun, talk that was a merry war of words, ideas and points of view as wide apart as that of a Jap and a German. For every land upon the earth had sent its army of ideas, and they all charged together here, and the walls of the Dirty Spoon resounded with the battle—with roars of laughter and applause. For we were of free, tolerant minds. We were gay, young dogs of war who had left our tails behind us—our tails of prejudice, distrust—and our emancipated souls had only scorn for hatreds born of race or creed. Like J. K., we had rid ourselves of all creeds past and present—but J. K. had always been free with a scowl, his feet set grimly on the ground—we here were free with a verve and a dash that took us careering up into the stars to laugh at the very heavens.