The thing I went in for during my all-too-brief sojourn in New York was not to improve my erratic mind and my slim, young body, but to fill them both to the gunwales with life, to have them beaten and tossed about and played with by the long swishing waves and wild white- capped breakers which roll over Manhattan with each sun's rising and setting. And if the cold gods had conspired together to that end I could not better have had my wish. I was borne along on the tumbling waves like an unmoored and rudderless cat-boat - a waif of destiny on the high seas. And all about were crafts of every known shape, from light-riding white-sailed ships, aflutter with pennants, to low rakish craft which flew the black flag. And 'twas many and many a one of them that ran across my bows.

You can go to New York for a variety of reasons: to study something - anything, from settlement work to the stock-broking game; to earn money or to spend it (it's a particularly good place for the latter purpose); to market your wares or to commit suicide; to turn your wits into money or to learn to poetically poison your body by way of the delicate pallid-tinted vices of the day. But my hope when I went there was that I might get local color - not to write with, but to swathe myself in - I wanted to gather up great lumps of it and throw it into my unquiet life, to make it of vermilion and indigo. I wanted to mix with something seething and vast and human and detailed. And as I always do what I want to do, if the road lies straight before me - or even if it's crooked, yet accessible - I got what I wanted from little old New York. The unhuman aloofness which once was mine New York knocked off me in less than twenty flitting weeks, and for local color - my two perfectly good hands and my slim, young body were fascinatingly stained with it, in all the wonderful tints and tones, in a twelve-months' time. Here and yet, in the fastnesses of Butte-Montana, I look at my finger-tips and I see a little rose-glow of passion on them: the local color of the town of Treacherous Delights. And it will not rub off. It will never rub off.

Of three elemental things which lure humanity, the lure of the wild, the lure of the blood, and the lure of seething cities, it's the lure of seething cities which is the last winner out. The lure of the wild - back to Nature, and that - is strong, but at best a spasmodic thing. Our love for it hardly outbids our love for beds to sleep in, looking-glasses to look in, and silver forks and white serviettes at dinner. The lure of the blood is indeed passing strong - a pleasure of the chase (or the chased), an en- chantment, a seduction, an intoxication, all washed in the same white-burning fire and born of the same red instinct. It moves the world, but at that, following forever at its heels, are tawdry emotions of remorse, regret, dark humors, malcontents - and always there's the fatal element of satiety, the drop too much which can make wormwood of gold honey. But the lure of seething cities we have always with us. Their civilizations are as down cushions between our slim, young bodies and the rough surfaces of the world. The uncounted variety in them forfends satiety, and their infinite humannesses are the all-magnetic thrall that, while we contemn it, leads us to them, and back to them, and holds us in a quiescent bondage. It were better, as everybody knows, to live in New York and be knocked about and battered and bruised and seared, and by those tokens to be gifted with one spark of charity for one's kind, than to be deadlocked in a remote New England town, hedged in by puritanic and subtly immoral precepts, and with a large distrust of things human, like a worm in the bud, gnawing forever at one's soul.

The women I knew in New York were not, for the most part, an elevating influence - and all that tiresome stuff. They were something human to be liked, studied as piquant articles of vertu, loved, and made friends of. There are women in New York who go in for cults, religious, mental, psychological, scientific - what not? - till they're blue in the face, or at least in the vitals, but who have not reached so high a plane, from any viewpoint whatsoever, as a hash-slinger who meets misfortune gamely and is on the level with her pals. I associated with a lot of women, friends and half-fiends, whom I didn't in the least approve of, but at that I don't entirely approve of anybody - myself, or the citizens of Butte. If I like people, that's enough for me - approving of them be damned, as I used to say in my first book. (From people, by the way, of whom I do entirely approve, kind Devil deliver me.) But this article is to picture a few live ladies I have met, so it's to have at them - as many as one has space for, culled from among those captioned: the Logical Thief, the Morose Manicure Girl, my Face-fixing Friend, the Discontented Marryer of Husbands, the Kind-hearted Landlady, the Fluffy Slob, the Pink-and-Blue Dilettante, the Red-headed Fisher of Men.

The Fluffy Slob - a fat blonde person, with very white hands, very pink, shiny nails, very yellow hair, very glad clothes, and a very noticeable lack of brains - was my next-door neighbor in the last New York apartment-house but one that I lived in. She barely knew she lived. She had a white poodle, even fluffier than herself, and a black maid who regulated her life. It was the maid who put her to bed at night, hauled her up in the morning, sat her down to her food, and girded up her loins when she went forth on the highways. She was one of those vague people who float along on the high-tides of life without effort and with- out volition - to whom the whole scheme is naught but eating, sleeping, and the donning of gay raiment. She was a most lazy creature - too lazy even to pronounce her words correctly. And thus the Fluffy Slob: "But if you really wanta know a nice gen'leman, you wait till you meet my gen'leman frien'. My gen'leman frien', he comes Friday nights, and we have a good, quiet, comfortable time. On Friday night I don' care for the theater, and I don' care to stick around the restaurants, and I don' care to go out in a taxi - I just wanta sit down and have a talk with my gen'leman frien'. His manners are so restful - you hardly know you're entertainin' a gen'leman when he's there - he's that soothin'. You yourself seem to have such noisy frien's - I hear you in there sometimes. And so I just wantcha to meet my gen'leman frien'." And one Friday night I did meet the gen'leman frien'. He was, indeed, all that she had said. If the Fluffy Slob was barely conscious of living, her gen'leman frien' went her one better - he had all but passed away. He was pallid, white-haired, silent - a very ghost of a gen'leman frien'. Yet I dare say he had his uses in this bright world - he suited the Fluffy Slob right down to the ground. And there are many, many like her in New York.

The Red-headed Fisher of Men was a half-friend of mine and a marked contrast to all fluffy slobs and other tame birds. She was a dazzler - a high-flier and a very beautiful woman - with slenderness and grace and hair like burnished copper shining in the sun. Her way of entering a room was like that of the duchesses of one's dreams, and her speaking voice was the most seductive I have ever heard. It rivaled Mrs Fiske's, in Mrs Fiske's great moments. And with all this equipment the Red-headed Fisher was nothing more and nothing less than a blackmailer, and her prey was Wall Street brokers. She used occasionally to have a cup of tea and a cigarette with me, and an afternoon's visit. And thus the Red-headed: "Well, it may not be ethics and it may not be morals, but if I see a man with a pair of eyes in his head and a large account in a bank, I've just naturally got to have my toll out of it. The easiest thing in the world, believe me, Mary MacLane, is to blackmail a broker. They seem to lose their heads and then you've got them. They always have wives and fearfully respectable families and that makes them insanely cautious - so cautious they defeat their own purpose. But after all, it isn't because they're so very respectable, or so very cautious, that I find them an easy prey - it's because I myself - I say it without vanity - am so very handsome. I have lived, and lived well, on my looks alone since I was twelve years old. There's hardly a broker in Wall Street who wouldn't object to it being known that I visit his office, simply because I'm good looking and so well got up that everybody who knew it would suspect the `ulterior motive.' So, as I say, it's the easiest thing in the world - a half-hour's perfectly innocent conversation in a broker's office, and either he gives me as much money as I ask for - I'm wise enough not to demand too much - or I make things generally very nasty for him by simulating intimacy and telling a few wonderful lies. Of course," added the Red-headed, "unless one is very, very beautiful it doesn't work. But I know I'm beautiful - I have to know it - just as you know you're brainy, and Maude Adams knows she's magnetic." "You're certainly a stunner," said I, "and awfully clever, and a good fellow and altogether delectable - a rose o' the world. But your business seems to me a very rotten business to be in - you must have terrible moments." "Oh, yes, of course," she replied, "but who hasn't terrible moments? They're all in the day's work. I also have a very good living. I make men pay even for the privilege of admiring me - and so they should, what?" Rose of the world she surely looked, but she surely looked also a fisher of men. And like her, too, there are very, very many in New York.

My Friend in the Face-fixing Business - a plump bit of flotsam-and-jetsam, aged about five-and-forty, upon whom the untoward fates had wrought their wandering will for all of thirty brazen years. The world was her oyster and she either was constantly opening it by the hard brass of her kind of philosophy or having her fingers pinched and snapped by the sharp-edged and strong-muscled bivalve when it proved beyond her. She was heavily built, smartly garbed in black tailored suit, and endowed with a strongly marked appetite for food. If of her own purchasing the food took the form, perchance, of low-browed pork-chops, of some one else's it covered a wide range, from mallard duck to Mumm's. In two thick-padded, patchouli-scented rooms in Twenty-third street, just off the Avenue she conducted the business of putting anything from a thick layer of complexion to an entire new face on a large and somewhat shady clientele of female women. I first knew her in the life-time of her husband (who was the manager of Armless Wonders and Oriental Dancers and other unpleasing things) between whom and herself cups, plates, and saucers flew at meal-times with startling regularity and fury. Once a cup, which she aimed at her husband, went unusually wide of the mark and hit me beneath the ear with quite some force. From which time she and I were the best of friends. It was several years ago in Boston, and when I saw her again in New York her husband had been gathered to his long house and she was doing faces for a livelihood. She had an apartment up at Ninety-sixth street and thither I went every Monday night to take dinner with her. The dinner was sent in from a cafe and served by an antique deaf woman, "not quite all there," to quote popular rumor, who acted as intermittent hand-maiden for seven other apartments in the same building. And thus my Face-fixing Friend: "Now, Mary MacLane, if I seem to chuck in the eats for awhile instead of talking to you, just you remember I'm a poor working girl with a pelican's appetite. If you'd all day been doing over the maps of the rankest lot of plucked fowl that ever blew home from a week-end up the country, you'd know what honest hunger is. Here's the viands, so go to it, 'bo. Bring along that drawn-butter, you devil" - to the antique who presently sauntered nonchalantly in with it. The edge of the pelican's appetite having been removed, she proceeded. "If you ever think, Mary MacLane, of throwing away your little old pen and going into the face-fixing business, take a tip from me and gently refrain. I've been in several lines, but this certainly has them all nailed to the mast for showing up the kinks in the characters of ladies. I was in the hair-shampooing business for a while - I went up and down the Island dragging a living out of the tangled heads of the populace - and some nifty menages did I get into, my word. But that was nothing to what I get in this business. While I'm busy with my little trowel, laying on complexions, they're busy handing me out their raw inside histories. Bring the salad, you vampire. Yes, they tell me everything they know, and I hate it. It makes me feel as if I got only the lungs and livers and gizzards of life, and none of the white meat. But they seem to think I like it. Today a woman, whose complexion looked as if it had been eaten off her by a wild-cat, came in to have it put on again, and if she didn't give me one bad hour then I never had one. She gave me the complete story of her past, dating from about a day and a half before her birth (which it seems was premature and not entirely unconnected with her father's having eloped with the parlor-maid) up to that hour. Her family seem to have been visited with about every known affliction from cholera infantum to delirium tremens, and from very weak minds to very strong passions - and your face-fixing friend had 'em spread all over her. And, of course, it's me for the sympathetic every time. If they don't get their money's worth of sympathy out of me, besides their complexions, they think they're cheated. If I could do one or the other alone, I would not mind. But when it comes to renovating maps badly damaged by Manhattan orgies and sympathizing all over the place besides - it would tell on a mule's constitution. Open another bottle, you jade. But there are three distinct advantages in the business, after all. It saves me the necessity of paying good money to the vaudeville theaters, the moving picture shows, and those phoney clinics 'for women only.'" Thus my Face-fixing Friend like whom, even, there are several more in New York.

The Pink-and-Blue Dilettante: she was one of those astounding creatures to be met with, among the followers of the various arts, who strive madly to be original and unusual. The Pink-and-Blue was a girl of twenty-six, pretty, but rather colorless, with a yearly income of about three thousand dollars, which enabled her to be original up to the handle. She owned but two frocks at a time, a pink one and a blue one both made of liberty silk, which for some reason always looked appropriate. They looked like evening frocks in the evening, and yet at seven in the morning they seemed the nicest and girlishest of morning dresses. And at seven o'clock every Tuesday morning she came to call on me. She knew that that was as midnight to me, and she herself went to bed at any time between six in the evening and six in the morning. But seven o'clock and Tuesday morning invariably found her leaning over the foot of my little brass bed, in either her pink or her blue frock, and with her own special sort of conversation which she paid out without a smile and without a change of voice or face: "Daughter of Eve, I am come to drag thee from the arms of Morpheus back into this world of Pink Things. See, I have brought thee for breakfast a love apple," - laying a pale tomato on my white blanket - "rouse thee and eat it. I myself rose with the lark and performed three tasks: I made an inkwell out of a felt slipper; I killed my canary and ate it; I wrote an obscene letter to Lyman Abbott. Very presently I shall boil a ham. My grandfather's sister came an hour ago to visit me. I gave her the yellow bottle of salad dressing to play with and came away. A loathly object, she. But served in the form of veal pie she might pass. Once I wrote a monograph on how to make soup from corset-laces. Couldst do better, my pink pet, and write on how to make a veal pie from a great-aunt? Eternity itself might be fashioned out of a dead mouse, a rubber eraser, a postage stamp, and an umbrella. I crave a veal kidney. I must go. As I pass through your outer room I shall steal your brass snuff-box." Upon which I bounced out of bed and rushed after her to rescue my brass snuff-box - for the Pink-and-Blue quite meant what she said. A struggle for the snuff-box, and I was left gasping and bruised on the floor with the outer door closing on the Dilettante and the box. "That's the confoundest class of persons New York has to show," I thought to myself, as I crept back to bed. And New York can show many like her.

The Kind-hearted Landlady was a half-friend of mine who kept a lodging-house up-town and whom I liked to go and take a cup of tea with now and again, for being both kind-hearted and a landlady in New York struck me as being a very delicate incongruity indeed. She was a brow-beaten looking woman in a black wrapper, whom every ring at her front bell made start up like a frighted dear. She may have been laying up for herself treasures in heaven, but she assuredly laid up none in New York. Her kindness of heart, added to her being a landlady, meant a houseful of perpetually "broke" people who never paid their rent and were never turned out in the street. Consequently hers was an extraordinary little household, kept up on nothing a week, and with a very thick atmosphere of indebtedness always hanging over it. Said the Kind-hearted Landlady: "They not only can't pay their rent - they can't buy their food. So they want me to board them. I tried it for a week but, Lord, they ate me out of house and home - and me with nothing to show for it but a new sheaf of bills. And the gas-man came and threatened to jerk the gas range right out from under my pots and kettles - I was cooking dinner - if I didn't pay the gas bill. They own the stoves, you know. Well, he didn't do that, but he turned off the gas - and there was I with a half-cooked dinner, not a light in the house, not two coppers to buy a candle with, and a raft of hungry people sitting around in the dark. Just think of it - not the price of a tallow candle among twelve grown people." "Goodness," said I, in an inward spasm of mirth, "why on earth didn't you run out and pawn something?" "Pawn!" shrieked the Kind-hearted. "It's a pipe you don't really know what a New York lodging house is if you suppose there was anything left to pawn with when we'd got this far. We'd have pawned our false teeth if we could. I thought I couldn't stay in this business when I started in, but I find I can't get out. I seem to have adopted eleven people, and I can't keep them and I can't throw them away. It's an awful life." Thus the Kind-hearted Landlady - and I believe there's not another in New York.

New York or Butte-Montana, as I have remarked before, they are all, and with it all, - just human: the fascinatingest thing in the world.

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