hat I minded attacking things, I had done
plenty of that myself in Paris. But how different we had been back
there. We, too, had thrown old creeds to the winds, but with how much
more finesse and art. And there had been a large remoteness about it.
Each one had tossed his far-away country into the cosmopolitan pot, our
talk had been on a world-wide scale. But this crude crowd, except for
occasional mental flights, kept all its attention, its laughs and its
jeers, its attacks and exposures centered on this one mammoth town,
against which as a background they seemed the merest pigmies. Three
little muckrakers loomed against Wall Street, one small, scoffing
suffragette against a hundred and eighty thousand solid stolid Brooklyn
wives. They had posed themselves so absurdly close to the world of
things as they are.

And they were in such a rush about their work. Over there in Paris, with
all our smashing of idols, we had at least held fast to our one great
goddess of art, we had slaved like dogs at the hard daily labor of
honestly learning our various crafts. But here they stopped for nothing
at all. The magazine writers were "tearing off copy," the painters were
simply "slapping it down." One of them told me he "painted the real
stuff right out of life"--dashed it off with one hand, so to speak,
while he shook his fist at the town with the other. Everyone wanted to
see something done--and done damn quick--about this, that or the other.

My artist's eyes surveyed this group and twinkled with amused surprise.
But I could sit by the hour and listen to their talk. I found it mighty
refreshing, after those bills in the hardware shop, that monotonous
martyr feeling of mine and those worries down by the harbor.

But I felt the harbor always there, slowly closing in on my father, who
looked older day by day, slowly bringing things to a crisis. In the
garden behind our house on warm September evenings when these pigmies
gathered to chatter reforms, the harbor hooted at their little plans as
it had hooted at my own. One evening, I remember, when the talk had
waxed hot and loud in favor of labor unions and strikes, Sue left the
group and with a friend strolled to the lower end of the garden. There I
saw them peer over the edge and listen to the drunken stokers singing in
the barrooms deep under all these flower beds and all this adventurous
chatter of ours. I thought of the years I had spent with Sam--and Sue,
too, seemed to me to b