I wrote short stories by the score. Each one had a perfectly huge idea but each seemed worse than the one before. I took to myself the advice of Flaubert, and from a table before a cafe I would watch the people around me and jot down the minutest details, I filled whole pages with my strokes. But which to choose to make this person or this scene like no other in the world? There came the rub. How had De Maupassant done it? The answer came to me one night: "Not only by watching people. He talked to 'em, lived with 'em, knew their lives!" The very thing my music teacher had said about Beethoven. How uneasy I had been then, how absurdly young and priggish then in the gingerly way I had gone at the harbor. Thank heaven there was no harbor here. I could enter this life with a wholehearted zest. I began with one of my roommates. He was to be an architect. A hard-working little chap, his days were filled with sharp suspense. The Beaux Arts entrance examinations were close ahead. If he did not pass, he told me, his parents in Ohio were too poor to give him another chance. "If I have to go back to Ohio now," he said in that soft reflective voice of his, "I'll put up cowsheds--later on, barns--and maybe when I'm fifty, a moving picture theater. If I stay here and go back a Beaux Arts man, I can go to New York or Chicago and get right into the center of the big things being done." With a wet towel bound around his head he used to sit at his work half the night. I watched the lines tighten about his thin lips and between his gray eyes, grew to know the long weariness in them over some problem, the sudden grim joy when the problem worked out. One day he came home early. "Queer," he said simply. "I can see one side of your face, one side of your body, one leg and one arm. But the other side don't seem to be there." I looked up at him a moment. "Let's go out for a walk," I suggested. We went for a stroll in the Gardens. And here I was surprised and just a bit ashamed to find that while I had a real sympathy for him I had just as real curiosity. For here was a living illustration of the horror of going blind. I could see his jaws set like a vise, I could hear his low voice talking steadily on as though to keep from thinking. What was he thinking? What was he feeling? We talked of the most commonplace things. But moment by moment, through his voice and his grip on my arm, those sudden waves now of sickening fear, now of keen suspense, now of angry groping around for a foothold, seemed pouring from him right into me, became part of me--while the other part of me stood off and listened. "By God, this is life!" said one part of me. "No, it isn't; it's hell," growled the other part. "This thing has got to be settled!" I took him to an oculist, and there I had another close view, this time of intense relief.