door
attractions were considerably narrowed down, Ruth and I used to go
there about every other Sunday with the boy. We came to feel as
familiar with our favorite pictures as though they hung in our own
house. The Museum ceased to be a public building; it was our own. We
went in with a nod to the old doorkeeper who came to know us and felt
as unconstrained there as at home. We had our favorite nooks, our
favorite seats and we lounged about in the soft lights of the rooms
for hours at a time. The more we looked at the beautiful paintings,
the old tapestries, the treasures of stone and china, the more we
enjoyed them. We were sure to meet some of our neighbors there and a
young artist who lived on the second floor of our house and whom
later I came to know very well, pointed out to us new beauties in the
old masters. He was selling plaster casts at that time and studying
art in the night school.

In the old life, an art museum had meant nothing to me more than that
it seemed a necessary institution in every city. It was a mark of good
breeding in a town, like the library in a good many homes. But it had
never occurred to me to visit it and I know it hadn't to any of my
former associates. The women occasionally went to a special exhibition
that was likely to be discussed at the little dinners, but a week
later they couldn't have told you what they had seen. Perhaps our
neighborhood was the exception and a bit more ignorant than the
average about such things, but I'll venture to say there isn't a
middle-class community in this country where the paintings play the
part in the lives of the people that they do among the foreign-born. A
class better than they does the work; a class lower enjoys it. Where
the middle-class comes in, I don't know.

After being gone all the afternoon we'd be glad to get home again and
maybe we'd have a lunch of cold beans and biscuits or some of the
pudding that was left over. Then during the summer months we'd go back
to the roof for a restful evening. At night the view was as different
from the day as you could imagine. Behind us the city proper was in a
bluish haze made by the electric lights. Then we could see the yellow
lights of the upper windows in all the neighboring houses and beyond
these, over the roof tops which seemed now to huddle closer together,
we saw the passing red and green lights of moving vessels. Overhead
were the same clean stars which were at the same time shining down
u