He had touched the weakest point in my venture: I was not a writer, and I knew it. I knew I never should be one in the high sense which I then and still more now give to that word. I had neither the endowment nor the passion nor the ambition to be a writer. I was rather a student, wanting to understand things quite regardless of how I could use that understanding if I reached it. There was much selfishness in my wanting to know for the sake of knowing, much of a dead scholar in me; and that dead scholar has always hung, more or less a weight, about my neck. But if I was not a writer I had certain qualifications for the practice of the modest kind of journalism on which I had decided. I counted no little on my habit of planning in advance what I was going to do, and I had a strong conviction that a plan of my own was worth more than any plan which was made for me. Again, if I could not write, I did have a certain sense of what mattered in a subject and a strong conviction that it was my sense of what mattered, and not somebody else’s, that would give my work freshness and strength if it was to have any. Then there was my habit of steady, painstaking work—that ought to count for something. And perhaps I could learn to write. If I were to do so, could I do better than soak myself in French prose? I had read French steadily from my school days; I had done not a little translating of articles from the big reviews for _The Chautauquan_. If I could live with the language, might I not master something of what seemed to me its essential qualities, those which gave it both body and charm? These qualities were the soundness of structure, the way it held together, and the beautiful clarity of expression. At least I could try for them. But when I tried to explain all this to my critical friends they continued frankly skeptical, indignant. It was my father and mother who backed me up, though I think they were both puzzled and fearful. “I don’t know what you can do, Ida,” my father said, “that’s for you. If you think you can do it, try it.” But in the end it took all the grit I had to go ahead. Breaking up established relations is not easy. You begin by pulling up deeply rooted things, rooted in your heart; you abandon once cherished purposes. When I left _The Chautauquan_ I was no longer the eager and confident young woman who ten years before had started out for herself in Poland, Ohio; I was ten years older, and I was keenly conscious that I had in those ten years accumulated a fairly complete collection of shattered idols. That I could forget them as quickly and as completely as I did, I owe to the Paris of the nineties. I had scarcely passed her gates before I had fallen under her spell. At once I was experiencing all the amazing rejuvenation that comes from falling in love, whatever the object. It was not to be “See Paris and die,” as more than one friend had jeered. I knew with certainty it was to be “See Paris and live.”