“The ‘Smart Set’!” she exclaimed. “How can you? Why, they publish stuff about girls in blue bathtubs, and silly things like that.”

And I had the magnificent joy of telling her that she was referring to “Porcelain and Pink,” which had appeared there several months before.

FANTASIES

THE DIAMOND AS BIG AS THE RITZ

These next stories are written in what, were I of imposing stature, I should call my “second manner.” “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” which appeared last summer in the “Smart Set,” was designed utterly for my own amusement. I was in that familiar mood characterized by a perfect craving for luxury, and the story began as an attempt to feed that craving on imaginary foods.

One well-known critic has been pleased to like this extravaganza better than anything I have written. Personally I prefer “The Offshore Pirate.” But, to tamper slightly with Lincoln: If you like this sort of thing, this, possibly, is the sort of thing you’ll like.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON

This story was inspired by a remark of Mark Twain’s to the effect that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end. By trying the experiment upon only one man in a perfectly normal world I have scarcely given his idea a fair trial. Several weeks after completing it, I discovered an almost identical plot in Samuel Butler’s “Note-books.”

The story was published in “Collier’s” last summer and provoked this startling letter from an anonymous admirer in Cincinnati:

“Sir—

I have read the story Benjamin Button in Colliers and I wish to say that as a short story writer you would make a good lunatic I have seen many peices of cheese in my life but of all the peices of cheese I have ever seen you are the biggest peice. I hate to waste a peice of stationary on you but I will.“

TARQUIN OF CHEAPSIDE

Written almost six years ago, this story is a product of undergraduate days at Princeton. Considerably revised, it was published in the “Smart Set” in 1921. At the time of its conception I had but one idea—to be a poet—and the fact that I was interested in the ring of every phrase, that I dreaded the obvious in prose if not in plot, shows throughout. Probably the peculiar affection I 

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