Some fine day I'll have to pay, Dennis thought, you can't sacrifice everything in life to curiosity. For that was the demon behind his every deed, the reason for his kindness to beggars, organ-grinders, old ladies, and little children, his urgent need to know what they were knowing, see, hear, feel what they were sensing, for a brief moment to be them. It was the motivating vice of his career, the whole horrid reason for his writing, and some day he warned himself he must pay for this barter in souls.

Always as he emerged late in the afternoon from a long siege of writing, depressed by fatigue, he was accustomed to flagellate himself with reproaches and self-inquiry. Why had he come to New York, why had he chosen this career? though to tell the truth he could not remember having made any choice, he just seemed to have written. But if a Muse he must have, he reflected, why not the Muse of Military Life, or better the Muse of Advertising? . . . Actually I should have gone out to South Bend, he decided, into my uncle's shoe factory and made a big name for myself in the local lodges; but there again was the drawback. Did my uncle invite me? No. He said, "You'd be no good in my business, Denny. Here's a hundred dollars to go some place way off." "Thank you, uncle," I should have said briskly, "I prefer to take over the factory and with the little invention I have been working on all these years for combination shoe-stocking-and-garter I propose to make the Orphen shoe known the world over. Allow me, uncle," I should have said, "to put your business on its feet or at least on its back." Then I would have married Alice or was it Emma who lived next door? We would have had a cottage at a respectable Wisconsin lake in summer and winter fixed up the basement with chintz and old furnaces to be a boys' den. I would have satisfied both my intellect and my ego by sitting up nights reading thick books Alice couldn't possibly understand, and for my cosmopolitan urge I could have winked at stock company actresses. Even if it was Emma and not Alice I should have done that. But no, I am a born busybody. Curiosity is my Muse, lashing me thousands of miles across land and sea to study a tragic face at a bus window, not for humanity's sake but for the answer's sake. Have I no finer feelings, he begged his stern inquisitor, look what a loyal friend I have been to Effie Callingham, for instance; was there ever a truer friend? . . .

The answer to this query was not gratifying for his speculations on Effie, her emotions, her past, her future, had resulted in his latest book, so that if this was loyalty it worked hand in glove with his major vice. Face it, then, curiosity was the basis for the compulsion to write, this burning obsession to know and tell the things other people are knowing. Unbearable not to know the answers. Behind those blank faces on the subway, what? In the spiritualist parlor on Seventy-third and Amsterdam what casual guess sums up this one, what blind prophecy outlines another's future; in the reading rooms of the Forty-second Street Library countless persons absorbed in books (Why absorbed? What do they read? Why do they read it?) look up and away; what sentence stirred what memories so that interlacing thoughts float through glass and steel to faraway, to places you will never know, dwell familiarly on faces you will never see. At the Dolly Raoul Studio of Stage Dancing, Inc., Acrobatic, Ballet, Toe, Ballroom, Tap, Radio, Fourteenth Street and Second Avenue, what does the little peroxide Jewess leaning out the window feel or know, what perhaps beautiful plan is shaping in her little head for a break from Avenue A to Carnegie Hall? On paper you can fill in the answers, be these persons, transfer your own pain into theirs, remember what they remember, long for what they desire. Spread out in type, detail added to detail, invention added to fact, the figure whole emerges; invisibly you creep inside, you are at last the Stranger.