My dear Gorham: Well, I hope that Kling will be able to sell out for the price of dinner anyway,--but most of all that he sells out, and rids his own arms, as well as the public’s, of that fetid corpse, _The Pagan_. The last issue is the worst ever, and I don’t think there are lower levels to be reached. Joe doesn’t properly belong in an editor’s chair,--hasn’t taste or discrimination, and that’s all there is to it. He can make just as good money a thousand other ways,--most Jews can. I am enraged at Mencken and Nathan for satisfying the public and insulting their admirers so grossly with that cheap and banal play,--_Heliogabolus_. Any one who has read even Saltus’ _Imperial Purple_ knows that there is not a vestige of historical truth in the setting or dialogue,--and that character, Heliogabolus, the most dissolute minion of decadent Rome, portrayed as I thought our authors were about to do,--so truthfully that a limited edition hastily gathered up would be the only possible method of presentation in America,--that delusion induced me to part with two good dollars. Instead we have a senile Al Jolson, farting the usual bedroom-farce calamities. If you want to read up on Heliogabolus, read some of Dio Cassius, if you can procure the old scribe,--at least this is what my Akron man-of-the-world prescribes. He agrees with me about the book, and writes thus: “I confess I was terribly disappointed. When I think of that slim child of seventeen with his hair powdered with diamond dust and gold, his half oriental eyes all but closed, dressed in the costume of a priest of Baal, offering his hand covered with jewels, to a gladiator who has fallen at his feet with the words,--‘Hail, Lord,’ and answering him,--‘Call me not Lord, for I am thy Lady,’ and then read of the senile, doddering creature with twelve wives as he is pictured by the joint authors, I have to laugh.” Your N. Y. notes of the journalese, artists, etc., keeps me awake during these days of trial at the factory. I am packing cases and moving heavy cases of chocolate, barrels of sugar, etc., for my living at present, but even this is better than a station behind the soda counter. My father is just as impossibly tedious and “hard” as ever, and still as insistent on starvation wages. I’ll be glad when my mother returns from the south and the house and my own room are open to me again, and living will be a little less expensive. Then, too,--I am beginning to discover that I enjoy her society,--I have worked over her for three years painfully,--and the result is a woman of more interest than I had dared to hope for. I’m still in love, too, so I have much to be sad about. --/--/ 37: TO WILLIAM WRIGHT _Cleveland, Ohio_ _Feb. 5th, --’20_