I was beginning to find it in me to look down on, even to despise. _Mutatis mutandis_, I thought to myself, daily, hourly, where would _they_ be?... Where would _I_ myself be...? Bronx Park, Shelley, the violin, the free library, organ recitals in churches, my Eastern books, and meetings of the Theosophical Society, provided meanwhile the few beauty hours to which I turned by way of relief and relaxation. One and all fed my inner dreams, gave me intense happiness, offered a way of escape from a daily atmosphere I loathed like poison. Sometimes, sitting in court, reporting a trial of absorbing interest, my eye would catch through the dirty window a patch of blue between the clouds ... and instantly would sweep up the power of the woods, the strange joy of clean solitary places in the wilderness, the glamour of a secret little lake where loons were calling and waves splashing on deserted, lonely shores. I heard the pines, saw the silvery moonlight, felt the keen wind of open and untainted spaces, I smelt the very earth and the perfume of the forests.... A serious gap would follow in my report, so that I would have to borrow from the flimsy man, or from another reporter, what had happened in the interval. In this connexion there comes back to me a picture of a _World_ man whose work constituted him a star reporter, but who could write nothing unless he was really drunk. With glazed eyes he would catch the witness and listen to question and answer, while with a pencil he could scarcely direct, he scribbled in immense writing three or four sloping lines to each page of “copy” paper. It always astonished me that such work could be any good, but once I made a shorthand note of several of his pages, and found them printed verbatim in the next edition, without a single blue-pencil alteration. When this man sat next me, my intervals of absent-mindedness did not matter. His big writing enabled me to crib easily all I had missed. Other compensating influences, too, I found with my “room-mates,” especially with Boyde, to whom I had become devotedly attached. I was uncommonly lucky to have such friends, I thought. Talking with Boyde, playing the fiddle to his singing, sharing my troubles with his subtle, sympathetic, well-read mind, was an unfailing pleasure, that made me look forward intensely to our evenings together, and helped me to get through many a day of repulsive and distasteful work. Compared with the charm and variety of Boyde, Kay seemed stolid, even unresponsive sometimes.