To him they were frankly imaginative and fantastic, though invested with all the glamour of the real, wherein lay their power.

This investiture of the grotesque and impossible with reality, he looked upon as a trick--a skilful trick at best.

Great literature could not reside in such a field.

Their artistry was high, but he denied the worthwhileness of artistry when divorced from humanness.

The trick had been to fling over the face of his artistry a mask of humanness, and this he had done in the half-dozen or so stories of the horror brand he had written before he emerged upon the high peaks of "Adventure," "Joy," "The Pot," and "The Wine of Life." The three dollars he received for the triolets he used to eke out a precarious existence against the arrival of the White Mouse check.