date?), yellow or black gloves, a round, soft crush hat, very soft and
limp and very _different_, patent leather pumps, betimes a capecoat, a
slender cane, a boutonnière--all this in hard, smoky, noisy, commercial
St. Louis, full of middle-West business men and farmers!

I would not mention this particular person save that for a time he,
Peter and myself were most intimately associated. We temporarily
constituted in our way a "soldiers three" of the newspaper world. For
some years after we were more or less definitely in touch as a group,
although later Peter and myself having drifted Eastward and hob-nobbing
as a pair had been finding more and more in common and had more and more
come to view Dick for what he was: a character of Dickensian, or perhaps
still better, Cruikshankian, proportions and qualities. But in those
days the three of us were all but inseparable; eating, working, playing,
all but sleeping together. I had a studio of sorts in a more or less
dilapidated factory section of St. Louis (Tenth near Market; now I
suppose briskly commercial), Dick had one at Broadway and Locust,
directly opposite the then famous Southern Hotel. Peter lived with his
family on the South Side, a most respectable and homey-home
neighborhood.

It has been one of my commonest experiences, and one of the most
interesting to me, to note that nearly all of my keenest experiences
intellectually, my most gorgeous _rapprochements_ and swiftest
developments mentally, have been by, to, and through men, not women,
although there have been several exceptions to this. Nearly every
turning point in my career has been signalized by my meeting some man of
great force, to whom I owe some of the most ecstatic intellectual hours
of my life, hours in which life seemed to bloom forth into new aspects,
glowed as with the radiance of a gorgeous tropic day.