Dear William: --/--/ But I have cheering news to tell you. “My Grandmother’s Loveletters” tempted _The Dial_ to part with ten dollars, my first “litry” money,--the seduction was complete,--and you may begin to look for outrageous exposures next month or the next, in that magazine. I cannot write much now, cramped in this rooming house room, but when my mother returns from the tropics next month and I am re-installed in my own room with my little Victrola, I hope to revive my intimacy with la Muse. Just now I am deep in Baudelaire’s _Fleurs du Mal_, and won’t brook anything healthful or cheery about the place. 38: TO WILLIAM WRIGHT _Cleveland, Ohio_ _Feb. 24, 1920_ My dear William: --/--/ Take a layman’s word of advice and remain in your present surroundings as long as possible and extract the full amount of enjoyment from them while they last. It is not very exciting to arise and essay forth to ten hours dull and exasperating labor every morning at five-thirty and return home at night with a head like a wet muffin afterward. And that is the routine that I am enmeshed in at present, to say nothing of trying to exist on starvation wages. It’s the old bunko stuff about “working from the bottom up” and “earning an honest dollar” in practice, and if there are not some enlivening changes in it soon, I am liable to walk into the office and tell the amused and comfortable and rich and thriving spectator that “the joke’s up.” Catullus uses somewhere in his epigrams about a man that he was “----ed flat,” meaning I suppose a reference to emaciated thighs, etc., but the phrase is none too vivid for me to use at present in reference to my nervous and intellectual state. Add to this, an uncomfortable room, cold, etc., and a routine of hasty and inadequate meals snatched from chance lunch counters and there is further evidence for the state o’ things. --/--/ 39: TO GORHAM MUNSON [_Cleveland_] _March 6th, --’20_