“You know, Dreiser,” Peter said to me one day with the most delicious gleam of semi-malicious, semi-tender humor, “I am really doing all this just to torture Dick.  He doesn’t know a damned thing about it and neither do these Chinese, but it’s fun to haul ’em out there and make ’em sweat.  The museum sells an illustrated monograph covering all this, you know, with pictures of the genuinely historic pieces and explanations of the various symbols in so far as they are known, but Dick doesn’t know that, and he’s lying awake nights trying to find out what they’re all about.  I like to see his expression and that of those chinks when they examine those things.”  He subsided with a low chuckle all the more disturbing because it was so obviously the product of well-grounded knowledge.

Another phase of this same humor related to the grand artistic, social and other forms of life to which Dick was hoping to ascend via marriage and which led him, because of a kind of anticipatory eagerness, into all sorts of exaggerations of dress, manners, speech, style in writing or drawing, and I know not what else.  He had, as I have said, a “studio” in Broadway, an ordinary large, square upper chamber of an old residence turned commercial but which Dick had decorated in the most, to him, recherche or different manner possible.  In Dick’s gilding imagination it was packed with the rarest and most carefully selected things, odd bits of furniture, objects of art, pictures, books—­things which the ordinary antique shop provides in plenty but which to Dick, having been reared in Bloomington, Illinois, were of the utmost artistic import.  He had vaulting ambitions and pretensions, literary and otherwise, having by now composed various rondeaus, triolets, quatrains, sonnets, in addition to a number of short stories over which he had literally slaved and which, being rejected by many editors, were kept lying idly and inconsequentially and seemingly inconspicuously about his place—­the more to astonish the poor unsophisticated “outsider.”  Besides it gave him the opportunity of posing as misunderstood, neglected, depressed, as becomes all great artists, poets, and thinkers.

His great scheme or dream, however, was that of marriage to an heiress, one of those very material and bovine daughters of the new rich in the West end, and to this end he was bending all his artistic thought, writing, dressing, dreaming the thing he wished.  I myself had a marked tendency in this direction, although from another point of view, and speaking from mine purely, there was this difference between us:  Dick being an artist, rather remote and disdainful in manner and decidedly handsome as well as poetic and better positioned than I, as I fancied, was certain to achieve this gilded and crystal state, whereas I, not being handsome nor an artist nor sufficiently poetic perhaps, could scarcely aspire to so gorgeous a goal.  Often, as around dinnertime he ambled from the office arrayed in the latest mode—­dark