Dear Charlotte: --/--/ I am planning to move myself, and shall probably share with the Munsons in their [new] apartment. That would enable them to get a better place and I should have hot water and good heat for the winter which the place I am in now does not provide. I am wondering if you and Richard could spare me a loan of fifteen dollars to help me over the expenses of moving my things. I have not yet received a raise in salary at the office, and I have been getting so little that I am kept down to the bare necessities of life all the time. When something extra is demanded I have nothing to fall back upon and the situation is really far from pleasant. If you could do this I shall be able to pay you sometime soon, I think, and I would be a thousand times obliged. I am getting along very well at the office, but I intend to speak up for an advance in pay very soon. The wages they have been paying me have been much less than my capabilities are worth, and I don’t think I shall have much trouble in getting that raise if I speak about it to them. They are putting new responsibilities upon me all the time, and I am learning quite a good deal. But there is something necessary in life besides learning, as we all know. It is quite a stylish and almost snobbish set of educated people at J. Walter Thompson’s--they are very lofty and certainly seem to think that the social superiority of the place is enough to make up for low salaries. When they can pay one of their art directors 30,000 a year they can afford to pay some of their copywriters more than they do. I am working still on _The Bridge_, but it is far from complete yet. In the meantime I am working on some smaller poems that crop out from time to time very naturally. The situation for the artist in America seems to me to be getting harder and harder all the time. Most of my friends are worn out with the struggle here in New York. If you make enough to live decently on, you have no time left for your real work,--and otherwise you are constantly liable to starve. New York offers nothing to anyone but a circle of friendly and understanding brothers,--beyond that it is one of the most stupid places in the world to live in. Of course, one’s friends are worth it,--but sometimes, when you see them so upset by the fever and crowded conditions, the expenses and worries--you wonder whether or not there is much use in the whole business. I am, of course, rather tired out when I say these things. I shall probably be in a different and better mood later on when the weather cools, and when there is some life in the air. I have been through the hardest summer in my life--the hardest year, perhaps, when you consider the developments I have been through and the material difficulties that I have encountered. I want to keep saying “YES” to everything and never be beaten a moment, and I shall, of course, never be really beaten.