DICK-O.
NEW YORK—1890.
DEAR CHAS:
Brisbane has suggested to me that the Bradley story would lead anyone to suppose that my evenings were spent in the boudoirs of the horizontales of 34th Street and has scared me somewhat in consequence. If it strikes you and Dad the same way don't show it to Mother. Dad made one mistake by thinking I wrote a gambling story which has made me nervous. It is hardly the fair thing to suppose that a man must have an intimate acquaintance with whatever he writes of intimately. A lot of hunting people, for instance, would not believe that I had written the "Traver's Only Ride" story because they knew I did not hunt. Don't either you or Dad make any mistake about this.
DICK.
As a matter of fact they would not let me in the room, and I don't know whether it abounded in signed etchings or Bougereau's nymphs.
NEW YORK—1890.
DEAR FAMILY:
Today has been more or less feverish. In the morning's mail I received a letter from Berlin asking permission to translate "Gallegher" into German, and a proof of a paragraph from The Critic on my burlesque of Rudyard Kipling, which was meant to please but which bored me. Then the "Raegen" story came in, making nine pages of the Scribner's, which at ten dollars a page ought to be $90. Pretty good pay for three weeks' work, and it is a good story. Then at twelve a young man came bustling into the office, stuck his card down on the desk and said, "I am S. S. McClure. I have sent my London representative to Berlin and my New York man to London. Will you take charge of my New York end?"
If he thought to rattle me he was very much out of it, for I said in his same tone and manner, "Bring your New York representative back and send me to London, and I'll consider it. As long as I am in New York I will not leave The Evening Sun."