“Well, after my year’s contract which started with the News had expired, I tried freelancing. This didn’t go very well; so I determined not to spend all my savings visiting art editors. I boarded a boat one day and went to Europe. Four months later, I returned to New York and rented a studio. After I had paid my first month’s rent I was broke. At the magazines I would say that I had just returned from abroad, so that I got plenty of work, but I owned neither easel nor chair. After a few days the janitor, if you please, came to me and said that he and his wife had been talking about me and thought perhaps I needed some money and that they had eighty dollars upstairs which I could have right away if I wanted to use it. It sounds wild, but it’s true. They said I could take it and pay it back whenever I got ready, in six months or a year or two years.”
My estimate of poor old human nature was rapidly rising.
“Did you take it?”
“Yes, a part of it. I had to, in a way; but I paid it back in a little while. I often think of those people.”
We stopped talking about his career then and went down to look in the diningroom and after our car. The place was so unsatisfactory and it was still so early we decided not to remain for breakfast.
As I was sitting on the porch, Franklin having gone off to rout out Speed, an automobile approached containing a man and three women and bearing a plumcolored pennant labeled “Lansing, Michigan.” Pennants seem to be a habit with cars coming from the west. These tourists halted, and I was morally certain that they did so because of my presence here. They thought others were breakfasting. With much fluttering of their motoring regalia, the women stepped out and shook themselves while their escort departed to make inquiries. Presently he returned and with him our young host, who in the clear morning light seemed much more a farmer than ever—a plow hand. Something about his crude, untutored strength and energy appealed to me. I thought of his drunken father and how he might be trying to make the best of this place, against lack of experience and with a ne’er do well parent on his hands. Now he fixed me with a steady eye.
“You people goin' to have breakfast?” he asked.
“No,” I replied, pleasantly.
“You ain’t?”
“No.”