“Hello,” I said to myself, “I’d better get out of here.” Some of the men of the town I had succeeded in getting worked up to the point of investing in the wild business scheme I had formerly had in my head might at any moment pass along the bridge and recognize me. That might bring on an embarrassing moment. They might want their money back and I had no money to give. In fancy I began to see myself as a desperado revisiting the scene of some former crime. What had I done? Had I robbed a bank, held up a train, or killed someone? It might well be that at some time in the future I would want to write a tale of some desperate fellow’s having got into a tight hole. Now he had to pass, say in a park, the wife of a man he had murdered. I slunk away off the bridge, throwing my cigarette into the river and pulling my hat down over my eyes, becoming in fancy as I passed a man accompanied by a woman and a child the murderer my own fancy had created. When I had got to them my heart stopped beating and quite automatically I put my hand to my hip pocket as though there had been a pistol there. “Well, I was an enemy to society and if the worst came to the worst would sell my life as dearly as possible.” More absurdity in myself, endless absurdities. My own childishness sometimes amused me. Would it amuse others? Were others like myself, hopelessly childish? Many men and women seemed, in outward appearance at least, to comport themselves in life with a certain dignity. All history was filled with the stories of men who had managed to get through life with at least an outward dignity. Was all history a lie? There was a man who owned a bank or an automobile factory or who was a college professor or a judge. He rode about through the streets of a city in an automobile, was called a great man. How did that affect him inside, how did it make him feel? I began now wondering about myself. Suppose someone were suddenly to call me a great man. I imagined a tall serious-looking man with whiskers saying it. “He writes novels and tales. He is a great man.” And now as there was no one else to say the words set down above I said them myself and at first I liked the sound of them and then a desire to laugh took possession of me and I not only wanted to laugh at myself but I wanted everyone in America to laugh with me, at myself and at themselves too. Oh, glorious moment! No more great men again ever, no more bad men or good men, everyone on to everyone else. Was there a sense of something, I at that moment felt, in all American people everywhere? In the old days we Americans had been proud of what we thought of as our distinctive American humor but lately our humor had pretty much settled itself down into the universal dullness of the newspaper funny strip. A really great humorist like Mr. Ring Lardner had come to that. Would it not be a joke on us all if we were all, already, and in reality, pretty far beyond any outward expression of ourselves we were getting?