Decision was in reality taken out of my hands by the baggageman who said in response to inquiry, "I put your trunk on the 8:40 train. It is well on its way to New York."
Accepting this as a mandate to go on, I returned to my room in the University Club and went to bed, but not to sleep. For hours I tossed and turned in self-questioning, self-accusing fury.
"What a fool you have been to waste years of labor on a book which nobody wants and which has put you—temporarily at least—out of conceit with fiction. Why go on? Why spend more time and money on a vain attempt to dispose of this manuscript?"
Falling asleep at last, I regained a part of my courage, and at breakfast a faint glow of hope crept into my thinking. At nine o'clock I took the day train and in silence rode for nearly twelve hours, retracing the thirty years which lay between my first view of Manhattan and this my hundredth reëntrance. With no thrill of excitement I crossed the ferry and having registered at a small hotel on Thirty-fourth Street, went to bed at nine o'clock completely worn out with my journey.
A long night's sleep and a pot of delicious coffee for breakfast put so much sunshine into my world that I set out for Franklin Square with a gambler's countenance, resolute to conceal my dismay from my friends and especially from my publisher. There was something in the very air of Broadway which generated confidence.
Harpers' editors were genial, respectful, but by no means enthusiastic concerning my autobiographic manuscript, although I assured Duneka that I had vastly improved it since he had read it a year before.
"That may be," he granted, "but it is not fiction and nothing serializes but fiction. We'll be glad to schedule it as a book, but I don't see any place for it in our magazine." And then—more to get rid of me than for any other reason, he added, "You might see Collier's. Mark Sullivan is the editor up there now; it might be that he could use something of yours."
Duneka's indifference even more than his shunting my precious manuscript into the street brought back my cloud of doubt, for it indicated a loss of faith in me. To him I was a squeezed lemon. Nevertheless I took his hint. Sullivan, I knew and liked, and while I had small hope of interesting him in The Middle Border, I did think he might buy one or two of my short stories.
The Collier's plant humming with speed, prosperous and commercial, was not reassuring to me, but I kept on through the maze until I reached Sullivan's handsome room, where I was given an easy chair and told to wait, "the editor will see you in a few minutes."
Alert, kindly, cordial, Mark greeted me and taking a seat, fixed his keen blue, kindly eyes upon me. "I'm glad to see you," he said, and I believed he meant it. He went on, "This is the psychological moment for us both. I am looking for American material and I want something of yours. What have you to show me?"