He dawned on me in the spring of 1906, a stocky, sturdy, penetrative temperament of not more than twenty-four or -five years of age, steady of eye, rather aloof and yet pervasive and bristling; a devouring type.  Without saying much, and seeming to take anything I had to say with a grain of salt, he managed to impress himself on me at once.  Frankly, I liked him very much, although I could see at a glance that he was not so very much impressed with me.  I was an older man than he by, say, ten years, an editor of an unimportant magazine, newly brought in (which he did not know) to turn it into something better.  In order to earn a few dollars he had undertaken to prepare for the previous editor a most ridiculous article, some silly thing about newspaper writing as a career for women.  It had been ordered or encouraged, and I felt that it was but just that it should be paid for.

“Why do you waste your time on a thing like that?” I inquired, smiling and trying to criticize and yet encourage him at one and the same time, for I had been annoyed by many similar assignments given out by the old management which could not now be used.  “You look to me to have too much force and sense for that.  Why not undertake something worth your time?”

“My time, hell!” he bristled, like a fighting sledge-dog, of which by the way he reminded me.  “You show me a magazine in this town that would buy anything that I thought worthy of my time!  You’re like all the rest of them:  you talk big, but you really don’t want anything very important.  You want little things probably, written to a theory or down to ‘our policy.’  I know.  Give me the stuff.  You don’t have to take it.  It was ordered, but I’ll throw it in the waste basket.”

“Not so fast!  Not so fast!” I replied, admiring his courage and moved by his contempt of the editorial and book publishing conditions in America.  He was so young and raw and savage in his way, quite animal, and yet how interesting!  There was something as fresh and clean about him as a newly plowed field or the virgin prairies.  He typified for me all the young unsophisticated strength of my country, but with more “punch” than it usually manifests, in matters intellectual at least.  “Now, don’t get excited, and don’t snarl,” I cooed.  “I know what you say is true.  They don’t really want much of what you have to offer.  I don’t.  Working for some one else, as most of us do, for the dear circulation department, it’s not possible for us to get very far above crowd needs and tastes.  I’ve been in your position exactly.  I am now.  Where do you come from?”

He told me—­Missouri—­and some very few years before from its state university.

“And what is it you want to do?”

“What’s that to you?” he replied irritatingly, with an ingrowing and obvious self-conviction of superiority and withdrawing as though he highly resented my question as condescending and intrusive.  “You probably wouldn’t understand if I told you.  Just now I want to write enough magazine stuff to make a living, that’s all.”