Dick picked up a single manuscript from a heap. “I don’t want to inflict this on you, Dreiser,” he said sweetly and apologetically. “We had planned to do this before I knew you were coming.” “That’s the way he always talks,” put in Peter banteringly. “Dick loves to stage things. But they’re great stories just the same.” I leaned back, prepared to be thrilled. Dick drew up his chair to the table and adjusted a green-shaded gas lamp close to the table’s edge. He then unfolded his MS. and began reading in a low, well-modulated, semi-pathetic voice, which seemed very effective in the more sentimental passages. Reverently I sat and listened. The tale was nothing, a mere daub, but, oh, the wonder of it! Was I not in the presence and friendship of artists? Was not this Bohemia? Had I not long heard and dreamed of it? Well, then, what difference whether the tales were good or bad? They were by one whom I was compelled to admire, an artist, pale, sensitive, recessive, one who at the slightest show of inattention or lack of appreciation might leave me and never see me more. I listened to about nine without dying, declaring each and every one to be the best I had ever heard—perfect. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XXIV FROM now on, because of this companionship, my life in St. Louis took on a much more cheerful aspect. Hitherto, in spite of my work and my natural interest in a strange city, I had had intensely gloomy moments. My favorite pastime, when I was not out on an assignment or otherwise busy, was to walk the streets and view the lives and activities of others, not thinking so much how I might advantage myself and my affairs as how, for some, the lightning of chance was always striking in somewhere and disrupting plans, leaving destruction and death in its wake, for others luck or fortune. I never was blinded to the gross favoritism practiced by nature, and this I resented largely, it may be, because it was not, or I thought it was not, practiced in my behalf. Later in life I began to suspect that a gross favoritism, in regard to certain things at least, was being practiced in my behalf. I was never without friends, never without some one to do me a good turn at a critical moment, never without love and the sacrifice of beauty on the part of some one in my behalf, never without a certain amount of applause or repute. Was I worthy of it? I knew I was not and I felt that the powers that make and control life did not care two whoops whether I was or not.