But in this Chicago paper I found so much to perpend that I never reached the journals of other cities. I learned in an interview with Lady Diana Manners (“Pressed for Precious Secrets of Pulchritude, She Reveals a Surprising Lack of Them”) that The life of a newspaper person is not without its recompenses--aside from the weekly stipend. Sometimes it is a hard life--when, say, you scratch and pound upon the old dome, pleading, begging its tenant, Mr. Brain, to give up an idea, and you get in response a loud and hollow echo convincing you he has left for parts unknown! I learned from Chicago that The literary life of New York continues to rattle on. And it is a rather grand life: though a number of writers appear to scratch an existence from the soil of Greenwich Village and the purlieus of mean streets, most of the men who write our books live quite comfortably. One meets them every day--a prosperous crew--who lunch cosily at the ---- or at the ---- and not infrequently the ----, then are whisked homeward in shining limousines to put in another hour or so on the manuscript of a new novel. A few days later, filled with pensive, affectionate, and somewhat irreverent thoughts about the newspaper business, I went uptown to the offices of a very great New York paper--a paper which, as a gatherer of news, though it does not claim the “Greatest” phrase, comes a lot nearer to it than that one in Chicago. A beautiful bronze elevator lifted me gently to the tenth floor, a beautiful bronze attendant took my name politely and asked me to wait until my host emerged from conference. I gazed amazedly into the editorial penetralia, churchly in aspect, with groined ceiling, panelled alcoves, like pews, and lead-veined glass. Very handsome young women came strolling from those shadowy cloisters of opinion. A scholarly-looking young man, with tortoise spectacles, sat under a reredos of books. If not a curate, at least a curator. It all came down upon me with crushing force. How could one chaff this magnificent thing? How could one speak jocularly of The Press? This was all so terribly real, so unmistakably there. I remembered my amazement when I first entered the Curtis Building in Philadelphia. Beside the humble little state house where a nation was founded rises that gigantic cube of Americanization; in more senses than one it is the exact spiritual centre of America. Does it not contain a mosaic glass picture with “over a million pieces”? It has been told, with the jolliest humour, how several of the world’s greatest artists were commissioned, one after another, to create a painting of Plato’s Grove of Academe for that lobby; but they kept on “passing away” before it was done. There is something most quaintly American, I believe, in adoring Plato with a vast painting rather than by listening to what he had to say. At a window on the seventh floor (I think it was the seventh) might have been seen the strong masculine