At once I became an omnivorous reader of the newspapers, and I found to my joy that many of them felt as I did about the Parisian scene. They carried paragraphs as captivating as those that our _New Yorker_ unearths for its fascinating editorial department on the city to which it belongs. Another discovery which surprised me was that my best source for illustration was the illustrated catalogues of the French Salons of recent years. I wanted pictures of markets, of rivers, of beggars, of marriages, of all the things that people were doing as they went about their business. And what rejoiced me was that many French artists seemed to love the streets and what went on there in much the same way that I did. They loved to see Paris at her daily toil, meeting her daily problems, and every year they turned out pictures showing her at it. Later I was to discover that this daily life of the Parisians of different classes has always been material for able artists. The best illustrations I found for my Madame Roland in her youth were those of Chardin in the Louvre. My manner of living, the contacts and circumstances attending the gathering of my material for my newspaper articles brought me for the first time in my life into daily relations with that greatest segment of every country’s population—those whom we call the poor, and of whom if we are well-to-do or if we are rich we are so curiously unconscious. I had belonged all my conscious life to the well-to-do, those who spent a dollar without seriously weighing it. Society had seemed to me to be chiefly made up of such people. Of course there were the rich, but they were so few in number as to be negligible—at least they had never counted in my life; nor had the poor counted as a permanent class. I had the American notion that the chief economic duty of the poor was to become well-to-do. The laborer, the clerk, the man who worked for others should save his money, put it into the business, or start out for himself, no matter how hard, how meager the return. Dignity and success lay in being your own master, owning your own home—I am sure my father would rather have grubbed corn meal and bacon from a piece of stony land which was his own than have had all the luxuries on a salary. One of his complaints against the great oil trust was that it was turning the men of the Oil Region into hired men—mighty prosperous hired men, some of them, but nevertheless taking orders, even orders as to what to say, for whom to vote. To his way of thinking this was failure for an American. I suspect his philosophy working in me was at least partially responsible for my revolt against the kind of security I had achieved on _The Chautauquan_. I was a hired girl.