"Alien Young Men's Rescue Association." He labored at it over a year
before the monotony began to weary him. The aliens kept coming
inexhaustibly--Italians, Poles, Scandinavians, Czechs, Armenians--with
the same wrongs, the same exceptionally ugly faces and very much the
same smells, though he fancied that these grew more profuse and diverse
as the months passed. His eventual conclusions about the expediency of
service were vague, but concerning his own relation to it they were
abrupt and decisive. Any amiable young man, his head ringing with the
latest crusade, could accomplish as much as he could with the debris of
Europe--and it was time for him to write.

He had been living in a down-town Y.M.C.A., but when he quit the task of
making sow-ear purses out of sows' ears, he moved up-town and went to
work immediately as a reporter for The Sun. He kept at this for a year,
doing desultory writing on the side, with little success, and then one
day an infelicitous incident peremptorily closed his newspaper career.
On a February afternoon he was assigned to report a parade of Squadron
A. Snow threatening, he went to sleep instead before a hot fire, and
when he woke up did a smooth column about the muffled beats of the
horses' hoofs in the snow... This he handed in. Next morning a marked
copy of the paper was sent down to the City Editor with a scrawled note:
"Fire the man who wrote this." It seemed that Squadron A had also seen
the snow threatening--had postponed the parade until another day.

A week later he had begun "The Demon Lover."...

In January, the Monday of the months, Richard Caramel's nose was blue
constantly, a sardonic blue, vaguely suggestive of the flames licking
around a sinner. His book was nearly ready, and as it grew in
completeness it seemed to grow also in its demands, sapping him,