And his walk ... it was almost dainty mincing.  But then my walk was a loose, bent-kneed method of progression....

* * * * *

Miss Martin, the celebrated exposer of corrupt millionaires and captains of industry, was dark and tall.  She had been good-looking in girlhood.  She had fine eyes in a devastated face.

I found myself petted, mothered by her.  As soon as she saw me she removed a thread that hung to my coatsleeve.

At supper I was told of a new project.  A group of writers, especially of writers who were in revolt against big business and the corruption of the trusts, were about to effect a combination and start what was to be called the National Magazine; for it was to be no less than that, a magazine embracing all America, to serve as a re-invigorant and re-corroborant for new national ideals ... really only a tilting against the evils of big combinations, in favour of the earlier and more impossible ideals of small business units—­the ideal of a bourgeois commercial honesty and individual effort that could no more be re-established than could the big shoe factory be broken up and returned to the shanty of the village shoemaker....  Bryan’s dream ... the last effort of the middle classes to escape their surely destined strangulation ... which gave birth to the abortive progressive party.

I was assured by Miss Martin and Mackworth that a poet who could sing American ideals and dreams was needed by them....  Ray Stannard Baker, Peter Finley Dunne, Upton Sinclair, were all to write for them....

I saw clearly that their revolution was a backward-working one.  That the country’s business could never again be broken up into a multitude of small shops and individual competitors.

Of course, I was at that time a Socialist of the violent, fiery type—­with a strong cast toward the anarchism of Emma Goldman.

But it flattered me to be taken, as it were, into the inner councils of such great folk....

“Send us some of your poetry, with the right American ring to it, Johnnie,” suggested Miss Martin, “and we will make you the poet of the group.”

I think that Ally Merton’s clothes on me, and his correct tie, made my good impression, as much as my after-talk around the fireplace, where I spun yarns of my strange life and adventures.

* * * * *

“You made a hit,” commented Ally, as he conducted me back to his house, “it’s a great opening for you.  Follow it up!”

“I will!”

* * * * *

That night I could not sleep.  My blood made a tumult through my body.  Before dawn I had written two poems on national themes; didactic verses, each with a moral of democracy tagged to it, and much about the worth of simplicity in it, and the dignity of honest labour.

Yes, I would be their poet.  And America’s poet....