I returned to the office and took some assignment, which I cut short at three-thirty in order to get back to the Grand Opera House to sit beside her. The play was an Irish love drama, with Chauncey Olcott, the singing comedian, in the title rôle. With her beside me I thought it perfect. Love! Ah, love! When the performance was ended I was ready to weep over the torturing beauty of life. Outside we found the matinée crowds, the carriages, the sense of autumn gayety and show in the air. A nearby ice-cream and candy store was crowded to suffocation. Young girls of the better families hummed like bees. Because of my poverty and uncertain station I felt depressed, at the same time pretending to a station which I felt to be most unreal. The mixture of ambition and uncertainty, pride, a gay coaxing in the air, added to the need to return to conventional toil—how these tortured me! Nothing surprises me now more than my driving emotions all through this period. I was as one possessed. We parted at a street-car—when I wanted a carriage! We met at her aunt’s home at eight-thirty, because I saw an opportunity of deliberately evading an assignment. In this simple parlor I dreamed the wildest, the most fantastic dreams. She was the be-all and the end-all of my existence. Now I must work for her, wait for her, succeed for her! Her mediocre piano technique seemed perfect, her voice ideal! Never was such beauty, such color. St. Louis took on a glamour which it had never before possessed.... If only this love affair could have gone on to a swift fruition it would have been perfect, blinding. But all the formalities, traditions, beliefs, of a conventional and puritanic region were in the way. Love, as it is in most places, and despite its consuming blaze, was a slow process. There must be many such visits, I knew, before I could even place an arm about her. I was to be permitted to take her to church, to concerts, the theater, a restaurant occasionally, but nothing more. The next morning I went to church with her; the next afternoon unavoidable work kept me from her, but that night I shirked and stayed with her until eleven. The next morning, since she had to catch an early train for Florissant, I slept late, but during the next two weeks (she could not come oftener, having to spend one Sunday with her “folks,” as she referred to them) I poured forth my amazement and delight on reams of thin paper. I wonder now where they are. Once there was a trunk full.