as no
spectacles. Almost the whole of the wonderful panorama of the
universe is unseen by us, or, if seen, is but partially
understood or absurdly misunderstood. When it comes to the
subtler things, the things of science and art, rarely indeed
is there anyone who has the necessary training to get more
than the crudest, most imperfect pleasure from them. What
little training we have is so limping that it spoils the charm
of mystery with which savage ignorance invests the universe
from blade of grass to star, and does not put in place of that
broken charm the profounder and loftier joy of understanding.
To take for illustration the most widely diffused of all the
higher arts and sciences, reading: How many so-called
"educated" people can read understandingly even a novel, the
form of literature designed to make the least demand upon the
mind? People say they have read, but, when questioned, they
show that they have got merely a glimmering of the real
action, the faintest hint of style and characterization, have
perhaps noted some stray epigram which they quote with
evidently faulty grasp of its meaning.

When the thing read is a play, almost no one can get from it
a coherent notion of what it is about. Most of us have
nothing that can justly be called imagination; our early
training at home and at school killed in the shoot that finest
plant of the mind's garden. So there is no ability to fill in
the picture which the dramatic author draws in outline. Susan
had not seen "Cavalleria Rusticana" either as play or as
opera. But when she and Spenser were together in Forty-fourth
Street, she had read plays and had dreamed over them; the talk
had been almost altogether of plays--of writing plays, of
constructing scenes, of productions, of acting, of all the
many aspects of the theater. Spenser read scenes to her, got
her to help him with criticism, and she was present when he
went over his work with Drumley, Riggs, Townsend and the
others. Thus, reading a play was no untried art to her.

She read "Cavalleria" through slowly, taking about an hour to
it. She saw now why Brent had given it to her as the primer
lesson--the simple, elemental story of a peasant girl's ruin
under promise of marriage; of her lover's wearying of one who
had only crude physical charm; of his being attracted by a
young married woman, gay as well as pretty, offering the
security in intrigue that an unmarried woman could not offer.
Such a