your art, but if you must paint I will provide you
a room for it. Do you know how many rooms there are in this house,
Richard?

RICHARD

Really, Uncle Richard, I thank you, but--

UNCLE RICHARD

Don't mention it. And of course you can see to its proper arrangement
yourself.

RICHARD

I had no idea of this when I came and--but you see, it's not only the
studio an artist requires, it's atmosphere, the atmosphere of enthusiasm
and feeling. You might as well give a business man a brand new office
equipment and turn him loose on the Sahara desert as to shut a painter up
in a town like this and expect him to create. Artists need atmosphere just
as business men need banks. It's the meeting of like forces that makes
anything really go.

UNCLE RICHARD

But we are not wholly barbarous here, Richard. _This_, for example, and no
first-class New England city lacks culture.

RICHARD

I suppose there's no use explaining, but what first-class New England
cities regard as _culture_ your real artist avoids as he would avoid
poison.

UNCLE RICHARD

Well, well. But circumstances--really, Richard, don't you think it your
_duty_ to stay?

RICHARD

Why?

UNCLE RICHARD

Must I explain? We are met, after a long separation, in circumstances
personally sorrowful to me, and I trust, to some extent, to you as well.
We....

RICHARD

Yes, a _long_ separation.

UNCLE RICHARD

I admit, Richard, that from your point of view my attitude has not always
been as--as considerate, perhaps, as you might have expected. But I have
been a very busy man, and--

RICHARD

As far as I am concerned, uncle, I have nothing to blame you for; but my
mother....

UNCLE RICHARD

Your mother? Surely, Richard, your mother never criticised me to you? She
was much too fine a woman. Besides, I helped her in many ways you may know
nothing about.

RICHARD

No, mother said nothing. She wouldn't have, anyhow--and as far as your
helping her is concerned, I can only judge of that by results.

UNCLE RICHARD

Results? What do you mean? I have no desire to catalogue the things I have
done for one who was near to me, but--

RICHARD

That's all very well, uncle, and I have no criticism to make. What's over
is over. But when you speak of my duty to you, I think of how mother died
so young, and how I found out afterward her affairs were so difficult. I
had no idea--she sacrificed herself for me so long that I took it for
granted. But I think t