e of the
newspapers on the status of the coal-miner, and the connection between
my bright-colored pots and platters, and my father's lucky guess,
became a little too dramatic for my taste. I gave the collection to
the Metropolitan, and I've never bought a piece since. Morrison was
immensely put out. He'd been to great trouble to find some fine
Fontana specimens for me. And then not to have me look at them--He
was right too. It was a silly, pettish thing to do. I didn't know any
better then. I don't know any better now."

It began to dawn on Sylvia that, under his air of whimsical
self-mockery he was talking to her seriously. She tried to adjust
herself to this, to be sympathetic, earnest; though she was still
smarting with the sense of having appeared to herself as undignified
and ridiculous.

"And besides that," he went on, looking away, down the dusty highroad
they were then crossing on their way back to the house--"besides that,
I went back on a great scheme of Morrison's for a National Academy of
Aesthetic Instruction, which I was to finance and he to organize. He
had gone into all the details. He had shown wonderful capacity. It's
really very magnanimous of him not to bear me more of a grudge. He
thought that giving it up was one of my half-baked ideas. And it was.
As far as anything I've accomplished since, I might as well have been
furthering the appreciation of Etruscan vases in the Middle West. But
then, I don't think he'll miss it now. If he still has a fancy for it,
he can do it with Molly's money. She has plenty. But I don't believe
he will. It has occurred to me lately (it's an idea that's been
growing on me about everybody) that Morrison, like most of us, has
been miscast. He doesn't really care a continental about the aesthetic
salvation of the country. It's only the contagion of the American
craze for connecting everything with social betterment, tagging
everything with that label, that ever made him think he did. He's far
too thoroughgoing an aesthete himself. What he was brought into
the world for, was to appreciate, as nobody else can, all sorts of
esoterically fine things. Now that he'll be able to gratify that
taste, he'll find his occupation in it. Why shouldn't he? It'd be a
hideously leveled world if everybody was, trying to be a reformer.
Besides, who'd be left to reform? I love to contemplate a genuine,
whole-souled appreciator like Morrison, without any qualms about the
way society is put t