So Walter Babson found himself at twenty-one an outcast. He declaimed--though no one would believe him--that all the gentle souls he had ever encountered were weak; all the virile souls vicious or suspicious. He drifted. He doubted himself, and all the more noisily asserted his talent and the injustice of the world. He looked clean and energetic and desirous, but he had nothing on which to focus. He became an active but careless reporter on newspapers in Wichita, Des Moines, Kansas City, St. Louis, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco. Between times he sold real-estate and insurance and sets of travel books, for he had no pride of journalism; he wanted to keep going and keep interested and make money and spend it; he wanted to express himself without trying to find out what his self was. It must be understood that, for all his vices, Walter was essentially clean and kindly. He rushed into everything, the bad with the good. He was not rotten with heavy hopelessness; though he was an outcast from his home, he was never a pariah. Not Walter, but the smug, devilish cities which took their revenues from saloon-keeping were to blame when he turned from the intolerable dullness of their streets to the excitement of alcohol in the saloons and brothels which they made so much more amusing than their churches and parlors. Everywhere in the Western newspaper circles Walter heard stories of Californians who had gone East and become geniuses the minute they crossed the Hudson.... Walter also went East and crossed the Hudson, but he did not become a genius. If there had been an attic to starve in, he would have starved in one, but as New York has nothing so picturesque, he starved in furnished rooms instead, while he wrote "special stories" for Sunday newspapers, and collected jokes for a syndicated humorous column. He was glad to become managing editor (though he himself was the only editor he had to manage) of a magazine for stamp-collectors. He wrote some advertisements for a Broadway dealer in automobile accessories, read half a dozen books on motors, and brazenly demanded his present position on the _Motor and Gas Gazette_. He was as far from the rarified air of Bohemia (he really believed that sort of thing) as he had been in Kansas, except that he knew one man who made five thousand dollars a year by writing stories about lumberjacks, miners, cow-punchers, and young ladies of quite astounding courage. He was twenty-seven years old when he met Una Golden. He still read Omar Khayyam. He had a vague plan of going into real estate. There ought, he felt, to be money in writing real-estate advertisements. He kept falling in love with stenographers and waitresses, with actresses whom he never met. He was never satisfied. He didn't at all know what he wanted, but he wanted something stronger than himself.