It was a memorable meeting for me and I went away back to my work in Boston with a feeling that I had seen one of the very greatest literary personalities of the century, a notion I have had no cause to change in the twenty-seven years which have intervened.
CHAPTER XXXI
Main Travelled Roads
My second visit to the West confirmed me in all my sorrowful notions of life on the plain, and I resumed my writing in a mood of bitter resentment, with full intention of telling the truth about western farm life, irrespective of the land-boomer or the politicians. I do not defend this mood, I merely report it.
In this spirit I finished a story which I called A Prairie Heroine (in order that no one should mistake my meaning, for it was the study of a crisis in the life of a despairing farmer's wife), and while even here, I did not tell the whole truth, I succeeded in suggesting to the sympathetic observer a tragic and hopeless common case.
It was a tract, that must be admitted, and realizing this, knowing that it was entirely too grim to find a place in the pages of the Century or Harper's I decided to send it to the Arena, a new Boston review whose spirit, so I had been told, was frankly radical.
A few days later I was amazed to receive from the editor a letter of acceptance enclosing a check, but a paragraph in the letter astonished me more than the check which was for one hundred dollars.