It began with my spending mornings in the park with Jerry's children, who were nice children except for the way in which they continually reflected in their attitude toward their father, a growing consciousness of slighting and bitterness at home. Mrs. Jerry made a point of her generosity in rather forcing him on me on these occasions, and on the long walks which I fell in the habit of taking very early, or in the pale twilight whenever affairs at the theatre would permit me. I remember how the spring came on in the city that year. I saw it go with the children to school in a single treasured blossom, or trailing the Sunday trippers in dropped sprays of hepatica and potentilla back from the Jersey shore. Soft airs and scents of the field invaded the town and played in the streets in the hours when men were not using them. A spirit out of Hadley's pasture came and walked beside me. But it was not due to any suggestion of what there was in the invading season for me, that Jerry occasionally walked along with me, for the chief use Jerry had of the earth was to build cities upon. Jerry drew the sap of his being out of asphalt pavements, and the light that fanned out from the theatre entrances on Broadway was his natural aura. He had developed, he had branched and blossomed in the degree to which the inspiration of his work had been squeezed and strained through layers and layers of close-packed humanity; and the more he was played upon by the cross-bred, striped and ring-streaked passions and affections of society, the more delicate and fanciful and human his work became. His lean figure, now that it had filled out a little, was built to be the absolute excuse for evening clothes, and never showed to such an advantage as in their sleek, satiny blackness, with a good deal of white front, and the rather wide black ribbon to his glasses which brought out the natural pallor of his skin. His hair, which he wore parted very far at one side, and made to curve glossily to the contour of his head, was more like a raven's wing than ever, and had still its little trick of erecting slightly and spreading in excitement, especially when he was up for a curtain speech, and was, in the way he looked the part of the successful dramatist, a good half of the entertainment. His contribution to the occasion on which I was good enough to take his children for an outing to the Bronx or Van Cortlandt Park, was made by lying flat on his back with his hands clasped under his head waiting until I had exhausted myself with games before he was able to take any interest in me. I would come back to him after a while and sit on the grass beside him. Jerry's way of acknowledging the pains I had been at to amuse his offspring, was to pat one of my elbows with a hand which he immediately restored to its business of propping his head.