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on January 8, 1927, he returned to the Grosvenor in high spirits, and looking fit.

He had been, he wrote Mencken at once, `` in the country '', a euphemism for an experience that had not greatly changed him.

Charles Breasted remembers that, before unpacking his bag, he telephoned his bootlegger with a generous order, and almost at once `` the familiar procession of people began milling through our living room at any hour between two P.M. and three A.M. ''.

They were strays of every kind -- university students and journalists, Village hangers-on and barflies, taxi drivers and editors and unknown poets, as well as friends like Elinor Wylie and William Rose Benet, the Van Dorens and Nathan, Rebecca West and Hugh Walpole and Osbert Sitwell, Laurence Stallings, Lewis Browne, William Seabrook, Arthur Hopkins, the Woodwards.

When he came home from his office at the end of the afternoon, Breasted never knew what gathering he should expect to find, but there almost always was one.