was no suitable guide for him.  He was a brilliant but superficial and very material type who was convinced that in the having and holding of many things material—­houses, lands, corporation stocks, a place in the clubs and circles of those who were materially prosperous—­was really to achieve all that was significant in the now or the hereafter.  Knowing comparatively nothing of either art or letters, or that subtle thing which makes for personality and atmosphere in a magazine or in writing (and especially the latter), that grateful something which attracts and detains one, he was nevertheless convinced that he did.  And what was more, he was determined not only to make friends with and hold all those whom I might have attracted, providing they could prove useful to him, but also a number of a much more successful group in these fields, those who had already achieved repute in a more commonplace and popular way and were therefore presumably possessed of a following and with the power to exact a high return for their product, and for the magazine, regardless of intrinsic merit.  His constant talk was of money, its power to attract and buy, the significance of all things material.  He now wanted the magazine to be representative of this glowing element, and at the same time, paradoxical as it might seem, the best that might be in literary and artistic thought.

Naturally the thing was impossible, but he had a facile and specious method of arguing, a most gay and in some respects magnetic personality, far from stodgy or gross, which for a time attracted many to him.  Very briskly then indeed he proceeded to make friends with all those with whom I had surrounded myself, to enter into long and even private discussions with them as to the proper conduct of the magazine, to hint quite broadly at a glorious future in which all, each one particularly to whom he talked, was to share.  Curiously, this new and (as I would have thought) inimical personality of M——­ seemed to appeal to L——­ very much.

I do not claim that the result was fatal.  It may even, or at least might, have had value, combined with an older or slightly more balanced temperament.  But it seemed to me that it offered too quickly what should have come, if at all, as the result of much effort.  For in regard to the very things L——­ should have most guarded against—­show and the shallow pleasures of social and night and material life in New York—­M——­ was most specious.  I never knew a more intriguing and fascinating man in this respect nor one who cared less for those he used to obtain his unimportant ends.  He had positive genius for making the gaudy and the unworthy seem worthy and even perfect.  During his earlier days there, L——­ had more than once “cursed him out” (in his absence, of course), to use his own expressive phrase, for his middle-West trade views, as he described them, his shabby social and material ideals, and yet, as I could plainly see, even at that time the virus of his theories was working.  For it must be remembered that L——­ was very new to New York, very young, and never having had much of anything he was no doubt slightly envious of the man’s material facility, the sense of all-sufficiency, exclusiveness and even a kind of petty trade grandeur with which he tried to surround himself.