My children, my manifold duties as theatrical up-lifter and club promoter, together with a swift letting down of my mental and physical powers, caused me to question the value of all my writing. I went so far as to say, "As a writer I have failed. Perhaps I can be of service as a citizen," with my Oklahoma farms bringing in a small annual income, the scrape of my pen became a weariness. That I was passing from robust manhood to middle age was also evident to me and I didn't like that. I resented deepening wrinkles, whitening hairs and the sense of weariness which came over me at the end of my morning's work. My power of concentration was lessening. Noises irritated me and little things distracted me. I could no longer bend to my desk for five hours in complete absorption. How my wife endured me during those years I can not explain. The chirp of my babies' voices, the ring of the telephone, the rattle of the garbage cart, the whistle of the postman--each annoyance chopped into my composition, and as my afternoons and evenings had no value in a literary way, I was often completely defeated for the day. Altogether and inevitably my work as a fictionist sank into an unimportant place. I was on the down-grade, that was evident. Writing was a tiresome habit. I was in a rut and longing to get out--to be forced out. The annual dinner of the Institute of Arts and Letters that year was not cheering. With the loss of four members, Stedman, Aldrich, MacDowell and St. Gaudens, I realized as never before the swift changes at work in American letters. It was my duty and my privilege to speak that night in memory of MacDowell who had so often been my seat-mate, and as I looked around that small circle of familiar faces, a scene of loss, a perception of decay came over me like a keen wind from out a desolate landscape. On every head the snows had thickened, on every face a shadow rested. All--all were hastening to be history. * * * * * From that circle of my elders in the East, I returned to my children in the West with a sense of returning to the future. The radiant joy of Mary Isabel's face as I displayed her presents, a ring and a story book, restored me to something like a normal faith in the world. "Wead to me, wead to me!" was now her insistent plea, and putting aside all other concerns I turned the pages of her new book, realizing that to her the universe was still a great and never-ending fairy tale, and her Daddy a wonder-working magician, an amiable ogre. Her eager voice, her raptured attention enabled me to recover, for a moment, a wholesome faith and joy in my world--a world which was growing gray and wan and cold with terrifying swiftness.