Whether due to a naturally weak and physique or a mind which tortures itself with the evidences of a none-too-smooth working of the creative impulse and its , or whether I had merely had my fill of reportorial work as such and could endure no more, or whatever else might have been the cause, I finally to get out of the newspaper profession , come what might and cost what it might, although just what I was to do once I was out I could not guess. I had no trade or profession other than this, and the thought of editing or writing for anything save a newspaper was as far from me as engineering or painting. I did not think I could write anything beyond newspaper news items, and with this conclusion many will no doubt be glad to agree with me even unto this day.  
Yet out of this messy and heartless world in which I was now working I did occasionally extract a tale that was printable, only so low was my credit that I rarely won the privilege of writing it myself. Had I imagined that I could write I might easily have built up stories out of what I saw which would have shocked the souls of the magazine editors and writers, but they would never have been published. They would have been too low, gruesome, drab, horrible, and so beyond the view of any current magazine or its clientele.
 
Life at that time, outside the dark picture of it presented by the daily papers, must, as I have shown, be all sweetness and gayety and humor. We must discuss only our better selves, and arrive at a happy ending; or if perchance this realer world must be referred to it must be indicated in some cloudy manner which would give it more the charm of shadow than of fact, something used to enhance the values of the and more perfect and beautiful things with which our lives must concern themselves. Marriage, if I read the current magazines correctly, was a sweet and delicate affair, never by the slightest conduct of any kind. Love was made in heaven and lasted forever. Ministers, doctors, lawyers and merchants, were all good men, rarely if ever guilty of the and and trashy aspects of humanity. If a man did an evil thing it was due to his lower nature, which really had nothing to do with his higher—and it was a great for the intelligentsia of that day (maybe of this) to admit that he had two natures, one of which was not high. Most of us had only the higher one, our better nature.... When I think of the literary and social and bosh of that day, its utter and profound faith in its own goodness, as opposed to facts of its own visible life, I have to smile.
 
But it never occurred to me that I could write, in the literary sense, and as for editing, I never even thought of it. And yet that was the very next thing I did. I wandered about thinking what I was to do, deciding each day that if I had the courage of a rat I would no longer endure this time-consuming game of reporting, for the pitiful sum which I was allowed to draw. What more could it do for me? I asked myself over and over. Make me more aware of the , , force, charm, selfishness of life? It could not if I worked a hundred years. , as I even then saw, it was a boy’s game, and I was slowly but surely passing out of the boy stage. Yet in desperation because I saw disappearing the amount which I had saved up in Pittsburgh, and I had not one other thing in sight, I visited other newspaper offices to see if I could not secure, temporarily at least, a better regular salary. But no.............