could turn out a beautiful composition, yet how many times in the last few months had his breathless eagerness on entering the haunt of a creator turned to disgust when the sanctum proved to be either a sort of moral shambles where after drinking a number of anis del oso's everybody, after the manner of the characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream, got crushes on somebody other than his or her acknowledged or suspected paramour, or else a musty parlor filled with bourgeois amenities and photographs in plush frames. Yet the oddest part of it all was that when you had learned to pick and reject, to test merit with a solvent that assimilated the spurious ore and left only the metal, you were back triumphantly to your old sophomoric convictions that beauty was engendered by beauty,—degeneracy and gold-legged chairs notwithstanding. It was only that in the first reaction one had mistaken the unlovely parts for the whole. True to one's heritage one had assumed that Beauty ceased to be beautiful when there were spots on her garment. Why, a splash of blood on the white doorway of a house in Chestnut Street would be, in the eyes of Massachusetts, a hideous blemish, not because red was ugly against white for it wasn't, but because Boston loved the respectability proclaimed by spotless doorways, and abhorred murder. Whereas beauty had no more to do with respectability and murder than—oh, than digestion had to do with the price of butter. The disillusion and the discouragement was a matter
