The office of the _Globe_ proved a sprouting-bed for incipient literary talent. Hazard had, some fifteen or eighteen months before, in company with another newspaper man of whom later I heard amazing things, written a novel entitled _Theo_, which was plainly a bog-fire kindled by those blazing French suns, Zola and Balzac. The scene was laid in Paris (imagine two Western newspaper men who had never been out of America writing a novel of French life and laying it in Paris!) and had much of the atmosphere of Zola’s _Nana_, plus the delicious idealism of Balzac’s _The Great Man from the Provinces_. Never having read either of these authors at this time, I did not see the similarity, but later I saw it plainly. One or both of these men had fed up on the French realists to such an extent that they were able to create the illusion of France (for me at least) and at the same time to fire me with a desire to create something, perhaps a novel of this kind but preferably a play. It seemed intensely beautiful to me at the time, this book, with its frank pictures of raw, greedy, sensual human nature, and its open pictures of self-indulgence and vice. The way this came about was interesting but I would not relate it save that it had such a marked effect on me. I was sitting in the city reportorial room later one gloomy December afternoon, having returned from a fruitless assignment, when a letter was handed me. It was postmarked Chicago and addressed in the handwriting of Alice. Up to then I had allowed matters to drift, having, as I have said, written but one letter in which I apologized rather indifferently for having come away without seeing her. But my conscience had been paining me so much that when I saw her writing I started. I tore the letter open and read with a sense of shame: “Dear Theo: “I got your letter the day you left, but then it was too late. I know what you say is true, about your being called away, and I don’t blame you. I’m only sorry our quarrel” (there had been none save of my making) “didn’t let you come to see me before you left. Still, that was my fault too, I guess. I can’t blame you entirely for that. “Anyhow, Theo, that isn’t what I’m writing you for. You know that you haven’t been just the same to me as you once were. I know how you feel. I have felt it too. I want to know if you won’t send me back the letters I wrote you. You won’t want them now. Please send them, Theo, and believe I am as ever your friend, “ALICE.” There was a little blank space on the paper, and then: “I stood by the window last night and looked out on the street. The moon was shining and those dead trees over the way were waving in the wind. I saw the moon on that little pool of water over in the field. It looked like silver. Oh, Theo, I wish I were dead.”