“I tell this with particularity, because it was the very best thing that ever happened to me. As I worked with Professor Emerson, I gradually and painfully became aware that I did not know how to use my mind, and that my education was of the most shocking superficiality. I learned that I didn’t know how to think. I will admit that I was surprised and oh, how humiliated! If I’d only thrown myself on Professor Emerson’s mercy and told him that I knew my shortcomings and asked him to help me! But I was too youthfully proud for that, and I went on, dimly trying to get at the thing myself and marking with a hopeless appreciation, which would have doubtless amazed the Professor had he guessed it, the truly wonderful way in which he used his own exceptional intellectuality.
“It is a fine thing to know what you do not know. It set me to work to try to get what I did not have--a disciplined, well-ordered, logical mind, a store of knowledge, a really broad culture. Alas, I never got any of them, and I never shall. It takes different training and environment from infancy to produce them, as well as greater capabilities than mine. But I did at least get this--the habit of thinking things out for myself, and a poor opinion, thought out by the individual, is better than a lazy acceptance of some one else’s say-so.
“Naturally, my year with Professor Emerson gave me a very low opinion of my chances to become a writer. I let writing alone for a while, and then began doing little light things for the Pittsburgh _Gazette_, one of whose staff I had met while on a visit to Pittsburgh. They were mostly little essays--though that word is really too dignified for them--on the foibles and fashions of the time. Sometimes a drop or two of sentiment and little amusing incidents that I gathered when visiting in Washington and Baltimore--we Southerners are great visitors, you know--occasionally a scrap of very light verse.
“But this was not enough. I got restless and I wrote to the _Gazette_ people and asked for a job. I got it--I was to run the woman’s page of their evening paper, and do Sunday specials. After I arrived the duties of music critic were added, and later I had charge of a Sunday supplement. The people on the _Gazette_ were very kind and patiently tutored me through my greenhorn days. The training was excellent and I worked there very happily for several years.