It rained when I got off the train and the night promised to be dark but half an hour later the rain ceased and the stars came out. At the station I escaped notice. Already in the town I and my struggles had been forgotten. At the moment when I had so dramatically walked away from my factory there had been some little local newspaper furore--“Well-known business man mysteriously disappears. Not known to have had any troubles,” etc. I went into a baggage check room and left my bag and then to a ticket window where I bought a ticket to New York on a later train. Both the check room boy and the ticket-seller were strangers to me. It was evident the town had grown, suddenly and furiously, as industrial towns do grow. Had it become a centre for the manufacture of automobiles shoes rubber tires or chewing gum? I did not know. In the station waiting room ten or twelve people stood or sat about and several taxi drivers were shouting at the door. I walked away in the drizzling rain and stood on a bridge until the night cleared. Now it was plain to me that I had wanted to spend an evening alone with myself in the midst of the shadows of a former life. Since I had left the town much had happened. All during the last years of my life as a manufacturer and later as a Chicago advertising man I had secretly been writing tales and now they were beginning to be published. In some places they had been praised, in others blamed. I had loved the praise. It had made me feel very much as I had felt as a manufacturer when I had made a little money and had begun to dream of building a great factory and being father to workmen--that is to say, rather grand and noble. When my tales displeased people and when some critic wrote condemning me and calling me a dull or an unclean man I got furiously angry but always tried quickly to conceal my anger. I was really so angry that I did not want, on any account, to let the other fellow know how angry and hurt I was. Often the critic seemed merely to want to hurt. I had had a moment of exaltation, of joy in thinking I had penetrated a little into the life story of some man or woman. The person about whom I had been writing had been swept by some passion, of the flesh or spirit and I had been swept along with him. At such times I, as an individual, had no existence. Sometimes I had been seated writing all night at my desk and could not have told whether I had been there two hours or ten. Then the morning light streamed in at my window and my hands trembled so that I could no longer hold the pen. What a sweet clean feeling! During those hours there had been no life of my own at all. I had lived but in the characters I was trying to bring to life in my story and in the early morning light I felt as one shriven of all grossness, of all vanity, of all cheapness in himself. The process of writing had been for me purifying and fine. It had been curative and later I was filled with unholy wrath when someone said