In the office of the New York Independent sat William Hayes Ward, old, bent over, with his triple-lensed glasses behind which his dim, enlarged eyes floated spectrally like those of a lemur.
He greeted me with a mixture of constraint and friendliness.
"Well, my boy, you've certainly got yourself into a mess this time."
"A 'mess,' Dr. Ward?" I interrogated, quoting back to him the word he had used,—with rebuke in my voice.
"How else shall I phrase it?"
"—with the understanding that I expect from an old friend, one who bought my first poems, encouraged my first literary endeavours,—who enheartened and helped me at the inception of my struggle for recognition and fame."
"And now you've won too much of the baser coinage of fame, of a kind that a poet should never have."
"I have a poem with me ... one on the subject of what Christ wrote on the sand—after which he bade the woman go and sin no more ... and he who was without sin should cast the first stone."
Dr. Ward looked over the half-moons of his triple glasses at me ... he reached for the poem and read it.