After this there was nothing to say and but one thing to do. I could not say that I had had no opportunities; but just the same I was terribly hurt in my pride. Without knowing what to do or where to go, I there and then decided that, come what might, this was the end of newspaper reporting for me. Never again, if I died in the fight, would I condescend to be a reporter on any paper. I might starve, but if so—I would starve. Either I was going to get something different, something more profitable to my mind, or I was going to starve or get out of New York.

I went to the assistant and turned over my data, then got my hat and went out. I felt that I should be dismissed eventually anyhow for incompetence and insubordination, so dark was my mood in regard to all of it, and so out I went. One thing I did do; I visited the man who had first ordered the city editor to put me on and submitted to him various clippings of work done in Pittsburgh with the request that he advise me as to where I might turn for work.

“Better try the Sun,” was his sane advice. “It’s a great school, and you might do well over there.”

But although I tried I could not get on the Sun—not, at least, before I had managed to do something else.

Thus ended my newspaper experiences, which I never resumed save as a writer of Sunday specials, and then under entirely different conditions—but that was ten years later. In the meantime I was now perforce turning toward a world which had never seemed to contain any future for me, and I was doing it without really knowing it. But that is another story. It might be related under some such title as Literary Experiences.

N.B. Four years later, having by then established myself sufficiently to pay the rent of an apartment, secure furniture and convince myself that I could make a living for two, I undertook that perilous adventure with the lady of my choice—and that, of course, after the first flare of love had thinned down to the pale flame of duty. Need anything more be said? The first law of convention had been obeyed, whereas the governing forces of temperament had been overridden—and with what results eventually you may well suspect. So much for romance.