I was in New York as a guest, as an onlooker, wondering about the city and the men of the city and what they were thinking and feeling. There were certain men I wanted to see, who had written things I thought had given me new lights on my own people, the subjects of my tales. I dare say there was a good deal of a certain half-rural timidity in me. There was Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, whose book “America’s Coming-of-Age,” had moved me deeply. He with Mr. Waldo Frank, Paul Rosenfeld, James Oppenheim and others had just started a magazine, _The Seven Arts_ (that after its death was to be replaced by _The Dial_, published by a quite different group), and the magazine had not only offered to publish some of my things but its editors had asked me to come to see them. I wanted to go and was at the same time a little afraid. At that time there was a good deal of talk abroad as to a new artistic awakening in America. Mr. Waldo Frank’s “Our America” must have been in preparation at just about that time and it could not have been much later that Mr. William Allen White wrote in _The New Republic_, an article the import of which was that “The King is dead! Long live the King!” If there were new kings in the land, I wanted to see and consort with them if I could. As for _The Seven Arts_ magazine, there had been rumors of its coming birth, even in Chicago. Miss Edna Kenton had come from New York to Chicago at about that time and a meeting was held. There was a large party in a large house and upstairs somewhere the new day was under discussion. We, downstairs, did not just know what was being discussed but there was a kind of tingling sensation in the air. Little groups of us gathered in the rooms below. “What’s up?” It is to be remembered this was in Chicago and we were all young and no doubt naïve. “What they whispering about upstairs?” “Don’t you know?” Not to know was, we all felt, a kind of cultural blight. I had run from one group to another trying to find out and at just that moment a young doctor, who in his spare moments wrote poetry, came into the house and went hurriedly upstairs. A rather ribald fellow among the guests--Ben Hecht perhaps--who like the rest of us was angry that he had not been let into the secret, made an announcement. “I know what it is. Someone’s having a baby,” he said.