“Good-bye, Dan!”

“Good-bye, Buzzer!”

“Daniel,” called Mrs. Baxter from the interior of her tent, “you mustn’t call Mr. Gregory that!”

* * * * *

At Laurel again, I found it still a month before fall session.  All summer I had lacked my nude sunbaths to which I had become accustomed.  So again I sought my island.

* * * * *

I rented my room over the tinshop again, and was soon in the thick of the fall term.  By this time I had my contemporaries on the hill very much puzzled.

Henry Belton, the Single Tax millionaire, had come to Kansas City.  He was so diminutive as to be doll-like.  He had to stand on a box to be seen, when he spoke from the floor, at the banquet tendered him ... and I had gone in to Kansas City as his guest, and had been seated on his right hand—­I, in my painfully shabby clothes.

The professors and students could not see why I made such a stir with prominent people, how I held their friendship despite my eccentricities and deep poverty.

* * * * *

“I can’t help you any more,” observed Belton to me, as we sat in the lobby of the Coates House where he was putting up.

“Who the hell’s asking you to help me?” I replied.  “I came down from Laurel with no ulterior motive; I came just to pay you a visit, and to thank you personally for giving me six months of freedom from economic worry while I wrote my fairy drama ... anyhow, please remember that it wasn’t me you helped, but Poetry!”

“It’s too bad you can’t be a Single Taxer,” he sighed.  “I like you, Gregory, and I’d put you on my pension list if you’d only shift some of your fanaticism for poetry to the Single Tax cause.”

Since then I have been frankly sorry that I did not play the hypocrite to Belton, in order to be put on a pension for several years.  I might have achieved great verse during the leisure so afforded for calm, creative work.

* * * * *

I started a poetry club on the Hill....  I determined that it should be anarchistic in principle ... we should have no officials ... no dues ... not even a secretary to read dull minutes of previous meetings ... we should take turns presiding as chairman.  And the membership was to be divided equally with girls.

But the school year had begun unhappily for me.  I did not find Vanna there.  I went to visit her homely roommate.

“Vanna has gone off to Arkansas ... she is teaching school down there for the winter.”

“Thank God she’s not married somebody!” I cried, forgetting, and giving myself away.  Then Vanna Andrews’ roommate saw at last that it was not she I was interested in.  She gave way to invective.

“You! a worthless tramp like you!  A crazy fool!... to dare even hope that Vanna Andrews would ever love you!” In a torrent of tears she asked me never to speak to her again.