The singing over, silence reigned. But if you had listened at
his door you must have heard a pen going, swiftly and boldly.
He was hard at work, doing unto others what others had done
unto him. You were a stranger to him; some magazine had
accepted a story that you had written and published it. R. H.
D. had found something to like and admire in that story (very
little perhaps), and it was his duty and pleasure to tell you
so. If he had liked the story very much he would send you
instead of a note a telegram. Or it might be that you had
drawn a picture, or, as a cub reporter, had shown golden
promise in a half-column of unsigned print; R. H. D. would
find you out, and find time to praise you and help you. So it
was that when he emerged from his room at sharp eight o'clock,
he was wide-awake and happy and hungry, and whistled and
double-shuffled with his feet, out of excessive energy, and
carried in his hands a whole sheaf of notes and letters and
telegrams.
Breakfast with him was not the usual American breakfast, a
sullen, dyspeptic gathering of persons who only the night
before had rejoiced in each other's society. With him it was
the time when the mind is, or ought to be, at its best, the
body at its freshest and hungriest. Discussions of the latest
plays and novels, the doings and undoings of statesmen,
laughter and sentiment--to him, at breakfast, these things
were as important as sausages and thick cream.
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