“What a scamp!” I insisted lovingly.  “What an incorrigible trickster!”

“Dreiser, Dreiser,” he chortled, “there’s nothing like it.  You should not scoff.  I am a public benefactor.  I am really a creator.  I have created a being as distinct as any that ever lived.  He is in many minds—­mine, yours.  You know that you believe in him really.  There he was peeking out from between those bushes only fifteen minutes ago.  And he has made, and will make, thousands of people happy, thrill them, give them a new interest.  If Stevenson can create a Jekyll and Hyde, why can’t I create a wild man?  I have.  We have his picture to prove it.  What more do you wish?”

I acquiesced.  All told, it was a delightful bit of foolery and art, and Peter was what he was first and foremost, an artist in the grotesque and the ridiculous.

For some time thereafter peace seemed to reign in his mind, only now it was that the marriage and home and children idea began to grow.  From much of the foregoing it may have been assumed that Peter was out of sympathy with the ordinary routine of life, despised the commonplace, the purely practical.  As a matter of fact it was just the other way about.  I never knew a man so radical in some of his viewpoints, so versatile and yet so wholly, intentionally and cravingly, immersed in the usual as Peter.  He was all for creating, developing, brightening life along simple rather than outre lines, in so far as he himself was concerned.  Nearly all of his arts and pleasures were decorative and homey.  A good grocer, a good barber, a good saloon-keeper, a good tailor, a shoe maker, was just as interesting in his way to Peter as any one or anything else, if not a little more so.  He respected their lines, their arts, their professions, and above all, where they had it, their industry, sobriety and desire for fair dealing.  He believed that millions of men, especially those about him were doing the best they could under the very severe conditions which life offered.  He objected to the idle, the too dull the swindlers and thieves as well as the officiously puritanic or dogmatic.  He resented, for himself at least, solemn pomp and show.  Little houses, little gardens, little porches, simple cleanly neighborhoods with their air of routine, industry, convention and order, fascinated him as apparently nothing else could.  He insisted that they were enough.  A man did not need a great house unless he was a public character with official duties.

“Dreiser,” he would say in Philadelphia and Newark, if not before, “it’s in just such a neighborhood as this that some day I’m going to live.  I’m going to have my little frau, my seven children, my chickens, dog, cat, canary, best German style, my garden, my birdbox, my pipe; and Sundays, by God, I’ll march ’em all off to church, wife and seven kids, as regular as clockwork, shined shoes, pigtails and all, and I’ll lead the procession.”

“Yes, yes,” I said.  “You talk.”