Such things cost money, however.  In addition, my young friend, due to a desire no doubt to share in the material splendors of his age (a doctrine M——­ was ever fond of spouting—­and as a duty, if you please), had saddled himself, for a time at least, with an apartment in an exclusive square on the East Side, the rent of which was a severe drain.  Before this there had been, and after it were still, others, obligations too much for him to bear financially, all in the main taken for show, that he might be considered a literary success.  Now and again (so I was told by several of his intimates), confronted by a sudden exhaustion of his bank balance, he would leave some excellent apartment house or neighborhood, where for a few months he had been living in grand style, extracting his furniture as best he might, or leaving it and various debts beside, and would take refuge in some shabby tenement, or rear rooms even, and where, touched by remorse or encouraged by the great literary and art traditions (Balzac, Baudelaire, Johnson, Goldsmith, Verlaine) he would toil unendingly at definite money-yielding manuscripts, the results of which carried to some well-paying successful magazine would yield him sufficient to return to the white lights—­often even to take a better apartment than that which last had been his.  By now, however, one of the two children he eventually left behind him had been born.  His domestic cares were multiplying, the marriage idea dull.  Still he did not hesitate to continue those dinners given to his friends, the above-mentioned group or its spiritual kin, either in his apartment or in a bohemian restaurant of great show in New York.  In short, he was a fairly successful short-story writer and critic in whom still persisted a feeling that he would yet triumph in the adjacent if somewhat more difficult field of popular fiction.

It was during this period, if I may interpolate an incident, that I was waiting one night in a Broadway theater lobby for a friend to appear, when who should arrive on the scene but L——­, most outlandishly dressed in what I took to be a reductio ad absurdum of his first pose, as I now half-feared it to be:  that of the uncouth and rugged young American, disclaiming style in dress at least, and content to be a clod in looks so long as he was a Shelley in brains.  His suit was of that coarse ill-fitting character described as Store, and shelf-worn; his shoes all but dusty brogans, his headgear a long-visored yellowish-and-brown cross-barred cap.  He had on a short, badly-cut frieze overcoat, his hands stuck defiantly in his trousers pockets, forcing its lapels wide open.  And he appeared to be partially if not entirely drunk, and very insolent.  I had the idea that the drunkenness and the dress were a pose, or else that he had been in some neighborhood in search of copy which required such an outfit.  Charitably let us accept the last.  He was accompanied by two satellic souls who were doing their best to restrain him.