That feeling would come and with it would come vague floating dreams, thoughts, impulses--that had nothing to do with the formation of plots for football stories. The fat Yankee fish-seller in the New England town had surrendered his manhood in the presence of other men for the sake of a daughter who wished to pass herself off as a lady and the New England town where he lived was full of people doing strange unaccountable things. The writer was himself always doing strange unaccountable things. “What’s the matter with me?” he asked sharply, walking up and down before me in the room in the New York hotel and tearing the pages of my book. “Well, you see,” he explained, “when I wrote my first football story it was fun. I was a boy wanting to be a football hero and as I could not become one in fact I became one in fancy. It was a boy’s fancy but now I’m a man and want to grow up. Something inside me wants to grow up.” “They won’t let me,” he cried, holding his hands out before him. He had dropped my book on the floor. “Look,” he said earnestly, “my hands are the hands of a middle-aged man and the skin on the back of my neck is wrinkled like an old man’s. Must my hands go on forever, painting the fancies of children?” VIII The writer of football stories had gone out of my room. He is an American artist. No doubt he is at this moment sitting somewhere in a hotel room, writing football stories. As I now sit writing of him my own mind is filled with fragmentary glimpses of life caught and held from our talk. The little fragments caught in the field of my fancy are like flies caught in molasses--they cannot escape. They will not go out of the house of my fancy and I am wondering, as no doubt you, the reader, will be wondering, what became of the daughter of the seller of fish who wanted to be a lady. Did she become a famous pianist or did she in the end run away with a man from New York City who was spending his vacation in the New England town only to find, after she got to the city with him, that he already had a wife? I am wondering about her--about the man whose wife ran away with his friend and about the running man in the city streets. He stays in my fancy the most sharply of all. What happened to him? He had evidently committed a crime. Did he escape or did he, after he had got out into the adjoining street, run into the arms of a waiting policeman?