The room in which he works is outfitted with shaded lamps and heavy hangings, and somewhat suggests a first-class bordello. He works with his coat on and shuts the windows and pulls down all the curtains. He writes with a pencil on sheets of yellow paper. He cannot use a typewriter. He detests meeting people, even on business, and swears every time a caller is announced at _The Smart Set_ office. He never receives a woman caller save with his secretary in the room. He wears an amethyst ring. In his waistcoat pocket he carries an elegant golden device for snapping off the heads of cigars. He has his shoes shined daily, even when it rains. Like the late McKinley, he smokes but half of a cigar, depositing the rest in the nearest spitbox. Like Mark Twain, he enjoys the more indelicate varieties of humor. Like Beethoven, he uses neither morphine nor cocaine. Like Sitting Bull and General Joffre, he has never read the Constitution of the United States. He bought Liberty Bonds. He can eat spinach only when it is chopped fine. He knows French, Latin, Italian, and German, but is ignorant of Greek. He plays the piano by ear. In his taste in girls, he runs to the _demi-tasse_. I have never heard of him showing any interest in a woman more than five feet in height, or weighing more than 105 pounds. An anarchist in criticism, he is in secret a very diligent student of Lessing, Schlegel, Hazlitt, and Brandes. His pet aversion, among critics, was the late William Winter. He has no interest in any sport, save tennis and fencing, and never plays cards. He never accepts an invitation to dinner if he can avoid it by lying. He never goes to weddings, and knows few persons who marry. As a critic, he has been barred from many theaters. A. L. Erlanger, in particular, is a manager who views him as a colleague of Mephisto. He eats very little. He drinks numerous cocktails (invariably the species known as “orange blossom,” to which he has added two drops of Grenadine), a rich Burgundy, and, now and then, a bit of brandy. He once told me that he had no use for a woman who wasn’t sad at twilight. He has two male companions—so many and no more: Mencken and John D. Williams, the theatrical producer. He is rarely seen with any other. He was born, as the expression has it, with a gold spoon in his mouth. He has never had to work for a living. He works daily from 10 A.M. until 5 P.M. He plays from 5:30 until 8:30. Evenings, he spends in the theater. After the theater, he has supper. He retires anywhere from 11 P.M. to 3 A.M. He has made many trips abroad and has lived at different times in France, England, Germany, Italy, Austria, the Argentine, India, Japan and Algiers. He fell in love at first sight in 1913 with a flower girl in the Luitpold Café in Munich, but the hussy was distant. He would rather have Lord Dunsany in _The Smart Set_ once than William Dean Howells a hundred times.