rified
footman, "thank you for understanding. It is precious--very, very
precious to know that I am understood."

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XII

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By early springtide the poet had taken an old-fashioned house on the
south side of Washington Square; his sons-in-law standing for it--as
the poet was actually beginning to droop amid the civilized luxury of
Madison Avenue. He missed what he called his own "den." So he got it,
rent free, and furnished it sparingly with furniture of a slabby variety
until the effect produced might, profanely speaking, be described as
dinky.

His friends, too, who haunted the house, bore curious conformity to the
furnishing, being individually in various degrees either squatty, slabby
or dinky; and twice a week they gathered for "Conferences" upon what he
and they described as "L'Arr Noovo."

L'Arr Noovo, a pleasing variation of the slab style in Art, had
profoundly impressed the poet. Glass window-panes, designed with tulip
patterns, were cunningly inserted into all sorts of furniture where
window-glass didn't belong, and the effect appeared to be profitable;
for up-stairs in his "shop," workmen were very busy creating
extraordinary designs and setting tulip-patterned glass into everything
with, as the poet explained, "a loving care" and considerable glue.

His four unmarried daughters came to see him, wandering unconcernedly
between the four handsome residences of their four brothers-in-law and
the "den" of the author of their being--Chlorippe, aged thirteen;
Philodice, fourteen; Dione, fifteen, and Aphrodite, sixteen--lovely,
fresh-skinned, free-limbed young girls with the delicate bloom of sun
and wind still creaming their cheeks--lingering effects of a life lived
ever in the open, until the poet's sons-in-law were able to support him
in town in the style to which he had been unaccustomed.

To the Conferences of the poet came the mentally, morally, and
physically dinky--and a few badgered but normal husbands, hustled
thither by wives whose intellectual development was tending toward the
precious.

People read poems, discussed Yeats, Shaw, Fiona, Mendes, and L'Arr
Noovo; sang, wandered about pinching or thumbing the atmosphere under
stimulus of a cunningly and unexpectedly set window-pane in the back of
a "mission" rocking-chair. And when the proper moment arrived the poet
would rise, exhaling sweetness from every pore of his bulky entity, to
interpret what he ca