an," because in that case you
probably liked the clog-dancer for the wrong reason--for something other
than that sublimated skill which is art. Of course this is only a wildly
chosen example. I never heard either of them mention "Peter Pan." And
the proper hatreds were ever more difficult than the proper devotions.
You might let Shakespeare get on your nerves, provided you really
enjoyed Milton. I wonder if you do see what I mean? It must be perfect
of its kind, its kind being anything under heaven; and it must never,
never, never be sentimental. It must have art, and _parti pris_, and
point of view, and individuality stamped over it. No, I can't explain.
If you have known people like that, you've known them. If you haven't,
you can scarcely conceive them.

By this time you are probably hating the Somerses, father and daughter,
and I can't help it--or rather, I've probably brought it about. But when
I tell you that I'm not that sore myself, and that I loved them both
dearly and liked immensely to be with them, you'll reconsider a little,
I hope. They were sweet and straight and generous, both of them, and
they knew all about the grand manner. The grand manner is the most
comfortable thing to live with that I know. I used to go there a good
deal, and Arnold Withrow went even more than I did, though he wasn't
even hanging on to Art by the eyelids as I do. (I refer, of course, to
my little habit of writing for the best magazines, whose public
considers me intellectual. So I seem to myself, in the magazines ...
"but out in pantry, good Lord!" Anyhow, I generally knew at least what
the Somerses were talking about--the dears!) Withrow was a stock-broker,
and always spent his vacations in the veritable wilds, camping in virgin
forests, or on the edge of glaciers, or in the dust of American deserts.
He had never been to Europe, but he had been to Buenos Aires. You can
imagine what Kathleen Somers and her father felt about that: they
thought him too quaint and barbaric for words; but still not barbaric
enough to be really interesting.

I was just beginning to suspect that Withrow was in love with Kathleen
Somers in the good old middle-class way, with no drama in it but no end
of devotion, when the crash came. Mr. Somers died, and within a month of
his death the railroad the bonds of which had constituted his long-since
diminished fortune went into the hands of a receiver. There were a
pitiful hundreds a year left, besides the a