that, during that period of work, I had been unclean or vile. And most of all I was furiously angry when someone said that the people of whom I wrote, being only such people as I myself had known, were of a lower, more immoral, less healthy order of beings. They were not respectable, were queer and did unaccountable things. I had myself been a respectable man and at one time in my life all of my friends had been respectable men and women and had I not known what was underneath the coats of many such, what they were too? I was furious for the men and women about whom I had written and furious for myself too but actually, on the outside, in the face of scurrilous criticism, had always assumed a sort of heavy bucolic genial manner, something in the manner of a certain type of benevolent old gentleman I had always detested. “They may be right,” I said aloud generously when inside myself I thought the critics often enough only dogs and fools. I was thinking of myself and my critics as I walked that evening in the rain and I presume that what I had wanted in coming back thus to the Ohio town was to try to arrive at some sort of basis for self-criticism. It was going to be a somewhat difficult undertaking, finding such a basis, of that I was sure. When I had been doing my writing, unknown and unseen, there was a sort of freedom. One worked, more or less in secret, as one might indulge in some forbidden vice. There were the bankers and others who had put money into my enterprises. They had expected I would be giving myself wholly to the matter in hand and I had been cheating and did not want them to know. One wrote tales, played with them. One did not think of publication, of a public that was to read. In the evening one came home to one’s house and going upstairs closed the door to a room. There was before one the desk and paper. In a neighboring garden a man was picking potato bugs off potato vines. His wife came to the kitchen door and began to scold. He had forgotten to bring home five pounds of sugar from the store and now she was angry about it. There came one of those strangely vital little domestic flare-ups, the man with a tin can in which were the captured bugs, looking ridiculous as he stood listening to his wife, and she in turn looking unnecessarily angry about the small matter of the sugar.