randa,
Mary, and Martha if she can spare the time. Among the male
contingent I shall want Job, Erasmus, Petrarch, Dante, Goethe,
Shakespeare, Milton, and Burns. I want men and women in whose
presence I must stand uncovered to preserve my self-respect. I want
big people, wise people, and dynamic people in my world, people who
will teach me how to work and how to live.

If I can get my world made and peopled to my liking, I shall refute
Mr. Wordsworth's statement that the world is too much with us. If I
can have the right sort of folks about me, they will see to it that I
do not waste my powers, for I shall be compelled to use my powers in
order to avert expulsion from their good company. If I get my world
built to suit me, I shall have no occasion to imitate the poet's
plaint. I suspect there is no better fun in life than in building a
world of one's own.

CHAPTER XXV

THIS OR THAT

One day in London a friend told me that on the market in that city
they have eggs of five grades--new-laid eggs, fresh eggs, imported
fresh eggs, good eggs, and eggs. A few days later we were in the
Tate Gallery looking at the Turner collection when he told me a story
of Turner. It seems that a friend of the artist was in his studio
watching him at his work, when suddenly this friend said: "Really,
Mr. Turner, I can't see in nature the colors that you portray on
canvas." The artist looked at him steadily for a moment, and then
replied: "Don't you wish you could?" Life, even at its best,
certainly is a maze. I find myself in the labyrinth, all the while
groping about, but quite unable to find the exit. Theseus was most
fortunate in having an Ariadne to furnish him with the thread to
guide him. But there seems to be no second Ariadne for me, and I
must continue to grope with no thread to guide. There in the Tate
Gallery I was standing enthralled before pictures by Watts and
Leighton, and paying small heed to the Turners, when the story of my
friend held a mirror before me, and as I looked I asked myself the
question: "Don't you wish you could?"

Those Barbizon chaps, artists that they were, used to laugh at Corot
and tell him he was parodying nature, but he went right on painting
the foliage of his trees silver-gray until, finally, the other
artists discovered that he was the only one who was telling the truth
on canvas. Every one of my dilemmas seems to have at least a dozen
horns, and I stand helpless before them,