he had done what he could to expel
All thoughts and all visual objects, for these were deceiving,
And I told him, so far as an ignorant layman could tell,
He had done that quite well.

But I think that of all of his phases the last was most funny;
He was vestured in white when I met him by chance in the town;
He had shaved off his beard, his beard, like Apollo's, of honey;
His hair was quite short, he had lost his habitual frown,
He was looking quite brown.

He told me he never exhibited now in a gallery;
Commissions were filling his time and engaging his heart;
What was more, he observed, he was making a regular salary,
So I asked him to tell me the worst and explain from the start
What had happened to Art.

"I have banished Design," he informed me, "and thoughts are all duller
Than Beauty, and Beauty is Art; but no critic can grouse
At the notion of Absolute Pure Indivisible Colour
As calm as Eternity, smooth as omnipotent _nous_--
I am painting a house."

EVOE.

* * * * *

[Illustration: _Visitor._ "YOUR FATHER SEEMS TO BE HAVING A STIFF TIME WITH
THE ROLLER?"

_Daughter of the House._ "OH, MUMMY ONLY SETS HIM ON TO IT WHEN HE'S BEEN
NAUGHTY."]

* * * * *

THE BEST OF THINGS.

"The New Poor?" said Holder, like myself, one of them. "Nonsense. There are
none. There are people who will not use their imaginations, of course. They
are poor, but not newly so. This so-called new poverty doesn't touch me.
True, the money I make will not go so far as it used to, but my imagination
goes very much farther. I have trained it, encouraged it, my wife's and
boy's too. We have cast off the absurd restraints imposed by the law of
probability. In the old days, when I used to think, say, of motors, I was
invariably badgered by the spectre of improbability. I used to think of a
four-hundred-pound car, or perhaps, in a daring moment, my thoughts would
creep timidly, like mice out into a still kitchen, on to the six-hundred-
pound plane, only to scurry back to the lower plane almost instantly. _Now_
I've thrown all that overboard. Rubbish! When I think of motors I think in
terms of Rolls-Royces. Why think cheaply? It's a poor imagination that
won't run to a six-cylinder car at least. Strictly, I shall never own a
real motor scooter. What of it? In my mind I use Roll