unadulterated, plain, bread-and-water appreciation of it.

I think that fact shows in his stories. He liked
enthusiastically to write of men doing men's work and doing it
man fashion with full-blooded optimism.

At his very best he was in heart and mind a boy grown tall.
He had a boy's undisciplined indifference to great personages
not inconsistent with his admiration of their medals. By
temperament he was impulsive and partisan, and if he was your
friend you were right until you were obviously very wrong.
But he liked "good form," and had adopted the Englishman's
code of "things no fellow could do"--therefore his
impulsiveness was without offense and his partisanship was
not quarrelsome.

In the circumstance of this story of "Soldiers of Fortune" he
could himself have been either Clay or Stuart and he had the
humor of MacWilliams.

In the clash between Clay and Stuart, when Clay asks the
younger man if the poster smirching Stuart's relation to
Madame Alvarez is true, it is Davis talking through both men,
and when, standing alone, Clay lifts his hat and addresses the
statue of General Bolivar, it is Davis at his best.

Modern criticism has driven the soliloquy from the theatre,
but modern criticism in that respect is immature and wrong.
The soliloquy exists. Any one observing the number of
business men who, talking aloud to themselves, walk Fifth