This man had a method of opening safes, which consisted of filing his finger-nails off, so that with the quivering raw flesh he could feel the dropping of the “tumblers,” as he turned the dial of the lock. He was promised his liberty if he would open the vault for the great state of Ohio. He did it in ten seconds; and then the promise was broken, and he went back to die in prison. When his coffin was carted out, there was his old heart-broken mother in the slush and snow, toddling along with streaming eyes and stretched-out hands behind the cart. That was a real story, you see; and O. Henry was in the prison when it happened, he felt the thrill of horror and fury that ran through the place when the pardon was denied. But, you see, if he had written that story, he would not have had any Christmas gifts to send to his little daughter, nor would he have been invited to Bagdad-on-the-Subway to be crowned the short story king. So unwilling was he to face reality that he did not even use the detail about Jimmy Valentine’s filing off his finger-nails. No, the crook in his story has to open the safe with a special fancy set of tools! You see, O. Henry simply could not face the pain of life; he did not know what to do about it, and so he dodged it--just like the magazine writers and the magazine public of his period. He could not even face his own disgrace; his heart was dead in that prison, even the thought of freedom was a terror, because of the awful secret he would carry. Jennings quotes him: “The prison label is worse than the brand of Cain. If the world once sees it, you are doomed. It shall not see it on me. I will not become an outcast.” Understand, he knew himself to be innocent; and yet he took the position of an ex-convict, crouching and trembling. There were other men who went to prison, for example, ‘Gene Debs, who also knew himself to be innocent; he came out a warrior and a saint. But O. Henry accepted the social system as permanent, identical with destiny. He was often compared to Maupassant, and that hurt his feelings, for he said that he had never written a filthy line in his life, and he did not wish to be compared to a filthy writer. You see here the limitations of his understanding; morality means sex, and he is revolted by Gallic brutality, and practices sentimental Southern reticence. But in a more fundamental way his point of view is identical with that of Maupassant; for to both writers class greed has taken the place of God in control of the universe. The French writer jeers and hates, while the American smiles and weeps; but each finds the point of his story in the incongruities and absurdities which this artificial economic fate inflicts upon its helpless and uncomprehending victims.