By this time, by the way, and as I should have said before, I had still further enlarged my staff by one art director of the most flamboyant and erratic character, a genius of sorts, volatile, restless, emotional, colorful, a veritable Verlaine-Baudelaire-Rops soul, who, not content to arrange and decorate the magazine each month, must needs wish to write, paint, compose verse and music and stage plays, as well as move in an upper social world, entree to which was his by birth.  Again, there was by now an Irish-Catholic makeup editor, a graduate of some distinguished sectarian school, who was more interested in St. Jerome and his Vulgate, as an embodiment of classic Latin, than he was in getting out the magazine.  Still he had the advantage of being interesting—­“and I learned about Horace from him.”  Again, there was a most interesting and youthful and pretty, if severe, example of the Wellesley-Mt.  Holyoke-Bryn Mawr school of literary art and criticism, a most engagingly interesting intellectual maiden, who functioned as assistant editor and reader in an adjoining room, along with the art-director, the makeup editor and an office boy.  This very valuable and in some respects remarkable young woman, who while holding me in proper contempt, I fear, for my rather loose and unliterary ways, was still, as I had suspected before employing her, as keen for something new and vital in fiction and every other phase of the scriptic art as any one well could be.  She was ever for culling, sorting, eliminating—­repression carried to the N-th power.  At first L——­ cordially hated her, calling her a “simp,” a “bluff,” a “la-de-da,” and what not.  In addition to these there was a constantly swelling band of writers, artists, poets, critics, dreamers of reforms social, and I know not what else, who, holding the hope of achieving their ends or aims through some really forceful magazine, were by now beginning to make our place a center.  It fairly swarmed for a time with aspirants; an amusing, vivid, strident world.

As for L——­, all this being new to him, he was as interested, fascinated even, as any one well might be.  He responded to it almost gayly at times, wondering whether something wonderful, international, enduring might not be made to come of it.  He rapidly developed into one of the most pertinacious and even disconcerting youths I have ever met.  At times he seemed to have a positive genius for saying and doing irritable and disagreeable things, not only to me but to others.  Never having heard of me before he met me here, he was convinced, I think, that I was a mere nothing, with some slight possibilities as an editor maybe, certainly with none as a writer or as one who could even suggest anything to writers.  I had helped him, but that was as it should be.  As for my art-director, he was at first a fool, later a genius; ditto my makeup man.