“The eastern men, among whom I had now come, were perhaps right in demanding something more than courage from American artists,” I began telling myself. It was apparent there were two steps necessary and it might well be that we middle-western men had taken but one step. One had first of all to face one’s materials, accept fully the life about, quit running off in fancy to India, to England, to the South Seas. We Americans had to begin to stay, in spirit at least, at home. We had to accept our materials, face our materials. There was one thing, but there was something else too. We had to begin to face the possibilities of the surfaces of our pages. Ah, here was something very difficult and delicate indeed! Was I right after all in sitting in the darkness of my room and looking at my own hands, pleading with my own hands? Had I really come to New York--not to find out and digest abstract thoughts about American life but to find there the men who would direct me more truly to the training of my own hands for my task? In the days of the old crafts men became apprenticed craftsmen at fifteen. Had the men of the new day to live nearly three times that long before they found out they need go looking for the masters? NOTE VIII I WAS living in a rooming house in a side street in New York and had spent more years of my life than I cared to think about in just such places. When I first began writing I used to read a great deal, in George Moore and others, of writers, painters, poets and the like sitting in cafés. That however happened in Paris, not in New York or Chicago. Everyone has read about it. You know how they do. In the evening one by one they come in at the door of the café. On the arm of the painter there may chance to be a beautiful grisette. The writers are less fortunate with the ladies and are glad to sit in silence listening to the talk. And how brilliant the talk! Such things are said! There is always an old wit, someone in the manner of Whistler or Degas. The old dog sits at a table keeping everything in order. I remember that two or three men I knew in New York tried something of the sort but did not quite pull it off. Let someone get a little “hifalutin’”--some scribbler, let us say. Suppose he sighs and says “The beautiful must remain the unattainable,” or something like that. Or let some other scribbler go off on a long solemn pronouncement about government, “All government should be done away with. It’s nonsense.” Bang! The Jimmy Whistler or the Degas of the café has shot him right between the eyes. There was a sense in which Miss Jane Heap of _The Little Review_ supplied the need of such a one in New York, but she and Miss Margaret Anderson could not cover the whole field. That was impossible.