s, and
returned to an earlier contention: "You underestimate," he said,
"the amount of education and taste and time it takes to arrange that
simple-looking vase of grasses, to appreciate your leaf-shadows."

"All I'm saying is that your campaign of aesthetic education hasn't
made the matter vital enough to people, to any people, not even to
people who call themselves vastly aesthetic, so that they _give_ time
and effort and self-schooling to the acquisition of beauty. They not
only want their money to do their dirty work for them, they try to
make it do their fine living for them too, with a minimum of effort on
their part. They want to _buy_ beauty, outright, with cash, and have
it stay put, where they can get their fingers on it at any time,
without bothering about it in the meantime. That's the way a Turk
likes his women--same impulse exactly,"

"I've known a few Caucasians too ...," Mrs. Marshall-Smith contributed
a barbed point of malice to the talk.

Page laughed, appreciating her hit. "Oh, I mean Turk as a generic
term." Sylvia, circling warily about the contestants, looking for a
chance to make her presence felt, without impairing the masculine
gusto with which they were monopolizing the center of the stage,
tossed in a suggestion, "Was it Hawthorne's--it's a queer fancy like
Hawthorne's--the idea of the miser, don't you remember, whose joy was
to roll naked in his gold pieces?"

Page snatched up with a delighted laugh the metaphor she had laid in
his hand. "Capital! Precisely! There's the thing in a nutshell. We
twentieth century Midases have got beyond the simple taste of that
founder of the family for the shining yellow qualities of money, but
we love to wallow in it none the less. We like to put our feet on it,
in the shape of rugs valued according to their cost, we like to eat it
in insipid, out-of-season fruit and vegetables."

"Doesn't it occur to you," broke in Morrison, "that you may be
attacking something that's a mere phase, an incident of transition?"

"Is anything ever anything else!" Page broke in to say.

Morrison continued, with a slight frown at the interruption, "America
is simply emerging from the frontier condition of bareness, and it is
only natural that one, or perhaps two generations must be sacrificed
in order to attain a smooth mastery of an existence charged and
enriched with possession." He gave the effect of quoting a paragraph
from one of his lectures.

"Isn't the end of th