And so there was Hobson and his father was proud of him and his college was proud of him and his future was assured. He wrote another football story and another and another. Things began to come his way and by the time he left college he was engaged to be married to one of the most popular girls of his class. She wasn’t very enthusiastic about his people but one did not need to live in the same city with them. An author can live where he pleases. The young couple came from the Middle-West and went to live in New England, in a town facing the sea. It was a good place for him. In New England there are many colleges and Hobson could go to football games all Fall and get new ideas for stories without traveling too far. The Italian-American has become what he is, an American artist. He has a daughter in college now and owns an automobile. He is a success. He writes football stories. V He sat in my room in the hotel in New York, fingering the book he had picked up from the table. The deuce! Did he want to tear the leaves? The fellow who came into the restaurant where Edward and I sat was in my mind perhaps--that is to say, the man who had been in prison. I kept thinking of the story writer as a man trying to tear away the bars of a prison. “Before he leaves this room my treasured book will be destroyed,” a corner of my brain was whispering to me. He wanted to talk about writing. That was his purpose. As with Edward and myself, there was now something between Hobson and myself that wanted saying. We were both story-tellers, fumbling about in materials we too often did not understand. “You see now,” he urged upon me, leaning forward and now actually tearing a page of my book, “You see now, I write of youth ... youth out in the sun and wind, eh? I am supposed to represent young America, healthy young America. You wouldn’t believe how many times people have spoken to me saying that my stories are always clean and healthy and the editors of magazines are always saying it too. ‘Keep on the track,’ they say. ‘Don’t fly off the handle! We want lots of just such clean healthy stuff.’” He had grown too nervous to sit still and getting up began to walk back and forth in the narrow space before the bed, still clinging to my book. He tried to give me a picture of his life. He lived he said, during most of the year, in a Connecticut village by the sea and for a large part of the year did not try to write at all. The writing of football stories was a special thing. One had always to get hold of the subject from a new angle and so, in the Fall, one went to many games and took notes. Little things happened on the field that could be built up and elaborated. Above all, one must get punch into the stories. There must be a little unexpected turn of events. “You understand. You are a writer yourself.”