"Wicked!" she exclaimed, "To shut yourself up like this! I said it was
fine to drop out of the world; but why have you cut off your old friends
from you? Why haven't you had a relapse, now and then, and come over to
hear Ysaye play and Melba sing, or to see Mansfield or Henry Irving, when
we have had them? And do you think you've been quite fair to Tom? What
right had you to assume that he had forgotten you?"
"Oh, I didn't exactly mean forgotten," he said, pulling a blade of grass
to and fro between his fingers, staring at it absently. "It's only that I
have dropped out of the world, you know. I kept track of every one, saw
most of my friends, or corresponded, now and then, for a year or so after
I left college; but people don't miss you much after a while. They rather
expected me to do a lot of things, in a way, you know, and I wasn't doing
them. I was glad to get away. I always had an itch for newspaper work, and
I went on a New York paper. Maybe it was the wrong paper; at least, I
wasn't fit for it. There was something in the side of life I saw, too, not
only on the paper, that made me heart-sick; and then the rush and fight
and scramble to be first, to beat the other man. Probably I am too
squeamish. I saw classmates and college friends diving into it, bound to
come out ahead, dear old, honest, frank fellows, who had been so happy-go-
lucky and kind and gay, growing too busy to meet and be good to any man
who couldn't be good to them, asking (more delicately) the eternal
question, 'What does it get me?' You might think I bad-met with
unkindness; but it was not so; it was the other way more than I deserved.
But the cruel competition, the thousands fighting for places, the
multitude scrambling for each ginger-bread baton, the cold faces on the
streets--perhaps it's all right and good; of course it has to be--but I
wanted to get out of it, though I didn't want to come here. That was
chance. A new man bought the paper I was working for, and its policy
changed. Many of the same men still wrote for it, facing cheerfully about
and advocating a tricky theory, vehement champions of a set of personal
schemers and waxy images."
He spoke with feeling; but now, as though a trifle ashamed of too much
seriousness, and justifiably afraid of talking like one of his own
editorials, he took a lighter tone. "I had been taken on the paper through
a friend and not through merit, and by the same undeserved, kindly
influence, after a month or so I was set to writing short political
editorials, and was at it nearly two years. When the paper changed hands
the new proprietor indicated that he would be willing to have me stay and
write the other way. I refused; and it became somewhat plain to me that I
was beginning to be a failure.