And, what was more, during this new period I heard and occasionally saw discouraging things in connection with him from time to time. True to his great promise, for I sincerely think M---- had a genuine fondness for his young protégé, as much of a fondness as he could well have for anything, he guaranteed him perhaps as much as three thousand a year; sent him to Stockholm at the age of twenty-four or -five to meet and greet the famous false pole discoverer, Doctor Cook; allowed him to go to Paris in connection with various articles; to Rome; sent him into the middle and far West; to Broadway for dramatic and social studies. Well and good, only he wanted always in what was done for him the "uplift" note, the happy ending--or at least one not vulgar or low--whereas my idea in connection with L----, gifted as he was, was that he should confine himself to fiction as an art and without any regard to theories or types of ending, believing, as I did, that he would definitely establish himself in that way in the long run. I had no objection of course to experiences of various kinds, his taking up with any line of work which might seem at the moment far removed from realistic writing, providing always that the star of his ideal was in sight. Whenever he wrote, be it early or late, it must be in the clear, incisive, uncompromising vein of these first stories and with that passion for revelation which characterized him at first, that same unbiased and unfettered non-moral viewpoint. But after meeting with and working for M---- under this new arrangement and being apparently fascinated for the moment by his personality, he seemed to me to gradually lose sight of his ideal, to be actually taken in by the plausible arguments which the latter could spin with the ease that a spider spins gossamer. In that respect I insist that M---- was a bad influence. Under his tutelage L---- gradually became, for instance, an habitué of a well-known and pseudo-bohemian chop-house, a most mawkish and naïvely imitative affair, intended frankly to be a copy or even the original, forsooth, of an old English inn, done, in so far as its woodwork was concerned, in smoked or dark-stained oak to represent an old English interior, its walls covered with long-stemmed pipes and pictures of English hunting and drinking scenes, its black-stained but unvarnished tables littered with riding, driving and country-life society papers, to give it that air of _sans ceremonie_ with an upper world of which its habitués probably possessed no least inkling but most eagerly craved. Here, along with a goodly group of his latter-day friends, far different from those by whom he had first been surrounded--a pretentious society poet of no great merit but considerable self-emphasis, a Wall Street broker, posing as a club man, _raconteur_, "first-nighter" and what not, and several young and ambitious playwrights, all seeking the heaven of a Broadway success--he