The feet of Theodore are making a path, the heavy brutal feet. They are tramping through the wilderness of lies, making a path. Presently the path will be a street, with great arches overhead and delicately carved spires piercing the sky. Along the street will run children, shouting, “Look at me. See what I and my fellows of the new day have done”—forgetting the heavy feet of Dreiser. The fellows of the ink-pots, the prose writers in America who follow Dreiser, will have much to do that he has never done. Their road is long but, because of him, those who follow will never have to face the road through the wilderness of Puritan denial, the road that Dreiser faced alone. _Heavy, heavy, hangs over thy head, Fine, or superfine?_ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ TALES OF THE BOOK Page ix FOREWORD xi DREISER 3 I’M A FOOL 21 THE TRIUMPH OF A MODERN 31 “UNUSED” 139 A CHICAGO HAMLET 185 THE MAN WHO BECAME A WOMAN 231 MILK BOTTLES 245 THE SAD HORN BLOWERS 287 THE MAN’S STORY 315 AN OHIO PAGAN ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I’M A FOOL ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I’M A FOOL IT was a hard jolt for me, one of the most bitterest I ever had to face. And it all came about through my own foolishness, too. Even yet sometimes, when I think of it, I want to cry or swear or kick myself. Perhaps, even now, after all this time, there will be a kind of satisfaction in making myself look cheap by telling of it. It began at three o’clock one October afternoon as I sat in the grand stand at the fall trotting and pacing meet at Sandusky, Ohio. To tell the truth, I felt a little foolish that I should be sitting in the grand stand at all. During the summer before I had left my home town with Harry Whitehead and, with a nigger named Burt, had taken a job as swipe with one of the two horses Harry was campaigning through the fall race meets that year. Mother cried and my sister Mildred, who wanted to get a job as a school teacher in our town that fall, stormed and scolded about the house all during the week before I left. They both thought it something disgraceful that one of our family should take a place as a swipe with race horses. I’ve an idea Mildred thought my taking the place would stand in the way of her getting the job she’d been working so long for.