“Oh, they’ve only been engaged a couple of months,” said Sylvia.  “What’s the hurry!  She’ll get her diploma in January.  It’d be a pity to have her miss!”

Arnold’s stepmother broke in rather impatiently, “If I were a girl engaged to Arnold, I’d marry him!”

“—­the trouble with all you connoisseurs, Morrison, is that you’re barking up the wrong tree.  You take for granted, from your own tastes, when people begin to buy jade Buddhas and Zuloaga bull-fighters that they’re wanting to surround themselves with beauty.  Not much!  It’s the consciousness of money they want to surround themselves with!”

Morrison conceded part of this.  “Oh, I grant you, there’s a disheartening deal of imitation in this matter.  But America’s new to aesthetics.  Don’t despise beginnings because they’re small!”

“A nettle leaf is small.  But that’s not the reason why it won’t ever grow into an oak.  Look here!  A sheaf of winter grasses, rightly arranged in clear glass, has as much of the essence of beauty as a bronze vase of the Ming dynasty.  I ask you just one question, How many people do you know who are capable of—­”

The art-critic broke in:  “Oh come!  You’re setting up an impossibly high standard of aesthetic feeling.”

“I’m not presuming to do any such thing as setting up a standard!  I’m just insisting that people who can’t extract joy from the shadow pattern of a leafy branch on a gray wall, are liars if they claim to enjoy a fine Japanese print.  What they enjoy in the print is the sense that they’ve paid a lot for it.  In my opinion, there’s no use trying to advance a step towards any sound aesthetic feeling till some step is taken away from the idea of cost as the criterion of value about anything.”  He drew a long breath and went on, rather more rapidly than was his usual habit of speech:  “I’ve a real conviction on that point.  It’s come to me of late years that one reason we haven’t any national art is because we have too much magnificence.  All our capacity for admiration is used up on the splendor of palace-like railway stations and hotels.  Our national tympanum is so deafened by that blare of sumptuousness that we have no ears for the still, small voice of beauty.  And perhaps,” he paused, looking down absently at a crumb he rolled between his thumb and finger on the table, “it’s possible that the time is ripening for a wider appreciation of another kind of beauty ... that has little to do even with such miracles as the shadow of a branch on a wall.”

Morrison showed no interest in this vaguely phrased hypothesis, 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.”