might do more good." The great town, in fact, sprawled and coiled about
him like a hideous monster--a piteous, floundering monster, too. It
almost called for tears. Nowhere a more tireless activity, nowhere a more
profuse expenditure, nowhere a more determined striving after the ornate,
nowhere a more undaunted endeavor towards the monumental expression of
success, yet nowhere a result so pitifully grotesque, grewsome,
appalling. "So little taste," sighed Truesdale; "so little training, so
little education, so total an absence of any collective sense of the fit
and the proper! Who could believe, here, that there _are_ cities
elsewhere which fashioned themselves rightly almost by intuition--which
took shape and reached harmony by an unreasoned instinct, as you might
say?"

But let that pass; he must take the town as he found it. Between his own
transplanted artistic interests on the one hand and his association with
the great throng of artists that the _Aufklaerung_ had doubtless brought
and held, he should do well enough. He figured mornings given over to
music and painting--his own; and afternoons of studio-rounds, when
fellow-artists would turn him their unfinished canvasses to the light, or
would pull away the clinging sheets from their shapes of dampened clay;
and evenings when the room would thicken with smoke and tall glasses
would make rings on the shining tops of tables, while a dozen agile wits
had their own way with Monet and Bourget and Verlaine. For the rest,
_concerts_, _spectacles_, _bals_; if need be, receptions; or, if pushed
to it, five-o'clock tea--with the chance that one other man might be
present. Thus the winter. As for the summer: "No canoeing, of course, on
the Lahn and the Moselle; I must fall back upon the historic Illinois,
with its immemorial towns and villages and crumbling cathedrals, and the
long line of ancient and picturesque chateaux between Ottawa and Peoria.
No more villeggiatura at Frascati or Fiesole; I shall have to flee from