Dismissing all these real handicaps, I plunged gaily into planning for a career in journalism, self-directed, free-lance journalism. Surely I could find subjects enough in Paris to write about, subjects that would interest American newspapers. We were in the thick of a great agitation over the condition and the conduct of American cities. _The Chautauquan_ had touched it occasionally. How did Paris keep house? I planned a syndicate of my own which would answer all questions. Out of my newspaper work might not articles grow for magazines? I thought so, and books, beginning of course with my study of Madame Roland. So long as I told nobody about my plans, they worked beautifully, carried me upward and onward into a new and happier, more profitable, more satisfying world. But when I announced my decision, laid out what I proposed to do, all the glow and confidence went out of me, all the weaknesses in my venture came again to the top. There were friends who said none too politely: “Remember you are past thirty. Women don’t make new places for themselves after thirty.” There were friends who resented my decision as a reflection on themselves. A woman whose friendship I valued said bluntly: “You are one of us. Aren’t we good enough for you?” My act was treason in her eyes. The whole force of the respectable circles to which I belonged, that respectable circle which knew as I did not the value of security won, the slender chance of replacing it if lost or abandoned, was against me and so out of friendliness.
When I told my editor-in-chief I was leaving, going to Paris to study, he was shocked. “How will you support yourself?” he asked, really anxious, knowing that I must depend on my own efforts.
“You’re not a writer,” he said. “You’ll starve.”
He had touched the weakest point in my venture: I was not a writer, and I knew it. I knew I never should be one in the high sense which I then and still more now give to that word. I had neither the endowment nor the passion nor the ambition to be a writer. I was rather a student, wanting to understand things quite regardless of how I could use that understanding if I reached it. There was much selfishness in my wanting to know for the sake of knowing, much of a dead scholar in me; and that dead scholar has always hung, more or less a weight, about my neck.