I had come to Gertrude Stein’s book about which everyone laughed but about which I did not laugh. It excited me as one might grow excited in going into a new and wonderful country where everything is strange--a sort of Lewis and Clark expedition for me. Here were words laid before me as the painter had laid the color pans on the table in my presence. My mind did a kind of jerking flop and after Miss Stein’s book had come into my hands I spent days going about with a tablet of paper in my pocket and making new and strange combinations of words. The result was I thought a new familiarity with the words of my own vocabulary. I became a little conscious where before I had been unconscious. Perhaps it was then I really fell in love with words, wanted to give each word I used every chance to show itself at its best. It had then not occurred to me that the men I had really come to New York hoping to see and know, fellows of the schools, men who knew their Europe, knew the history of the arts, who knew a thousand things I could not know, it had never occurred to me that in the end I would find them as frankly puzzled as myself. When I found that out there was a new adjustment to make. It was then only the trick men, the men who worked from the little patent formula they had learned, the critics who could never get English literature out of their heads, who thought they were sure of their grounds? That knowledge was a relief when I found it out but I was a long long time finding it out. It takes a long time to find out one’s own limitations and perhaps a longer time to find out the limitations of one’s critics. * * * * * Was there really something new in the air of America? I remember that at about this time someone told me that I was myself something new and how thankful I was to hear it. “Very well,” I said to myself, “if there are certain men launching a new ship from the harbor of New York and if they are willing to take me aboard I’ll sure go.” I was just as willing to be a modern as anything else, was glad to be. It was very sure I was not going to be a successful author and well enough I knew that, not being successful, there would be a great deal of consolation to me in being at least a modern.