“I look on him as a great and wonderful man!”

“Mark my word, Mr. Gregory, you’ll find yourself in some sort of mix-up if you go down to Eden to live with him.  You’re both too mad and inflammable to be in the same neighbourhood.”

Using all his powers of persuasion, Dr. William Hayes Ward tried to explain to me how I owed it both to Mr. Derek and Mr. Mackworth to finish my play.

“Have you no place else to go to, beside Eden?”

“I could run out to Perfection City—­and camp out there.”

“Now that’s a good idea ... why not try that?”

* * * * *

“Johnnie, had your lunch yet?” it was Dr. Percival Hammond, the managing editor, who was asking, leaning out from his cubbyhole where he sat before his desk.

“No, sir!”

“Come and share mine!”

I said good-bye to Dr. Ward and walked down the corridor to where Hammond sat.  He looked more the fashionable club man than ever, though he did have a slight sprinkling of dandruff on his coat collar.  I was quick to notice this, as I had been quick to notice Miss Martin’s few, close-scizzored hairs on her fine, thinking face.

Lunch!

But I was not to be taken out to a meal in a restaurant, as anyone might expect, but Hammond sat me down on a chair by his side, and he handed me a glass of buttermilk and a few compressed oatmeal cakes.

* * * * *

I had stayed over night at the Phi-Mu House, at Columbia, with Ally.  I had stayed up nearly all night, rather, arguing, in behalf of extreme socialism, with the boys ... till people, hearing our voices through the open windows, had actually gathered in the street without.

“You’re utterly mad, but we like you!” said one of the boys.

In the morning, before I clutched my suitcase in my hand and started for Perfection City, Ally showed me something that had come in the morning mail, which startled me.  It was a clipping from the Laurel Globe—­a vilely slanderous article, headed, “Good Riddance."...

And first it lied that I had run away from my “confederates” of the Scoop Club, leaving them to bear the onus of the investigation of the town’s morals ... which was, of course, not true ...  I had made a special point of going to the sheriff and asking him if I would be needed.  If so, I would defer my trip East.  And he had replied that it would be all right for me to go....

But the second count—­the personal part of the story, was more atrocious ... it intimated that I had, during my sojourn at Laurel, been an undesirable that would have made Villon pale with envy ... an habitue of the Bottoms ... that I had been sleeping with negro women and rolling about with their men, drunk.

I was so furious at this that I dropped my suitcase, clenched my hands, and swore that I was straightway going to freight it back and knock all his teeth down “Senator’s” Blair’s throat ... the dirty sycophant!  The lousy bootlicker! the nasty, putty-bodied slug!