t books to read, lived truly in the presence of the greatest art and
thought of the world ... and heard speak in the chapel, from time to
time, all the distinguished men of the country ... who came, sooner or
later, to visit Spalton and am? community....

What though the wages were not so big, what though you rang up the time
of arrival at work and the time of departure from it, on hidden
time-clocks, what though every piece of statuary, every picture, every
stick of furniture, had, on the bottom of it, its price label, or,
depending from it, its tag that told the price at which it might be
bought!...

* * * * *

Spalton had begun his active career as a business man, had swung out
from that, his fertile mind glimpsing what worlds of thought and
imagination lay beyond it!

But now Big Business was calling him back again, using him for its
purposes.

Oftener and oftener magnificently written articles by him began to
appear in his remarkable little magazine, _The Dawn_. And the Ingersoll
of Dollar Watch fame crowded out the Ingersoll of brave agnosticism ...
and when he wrote now of artists and writers, it was their thrifty
habits, their business traits, that he lauded.

"A great man can be practical and businesslike, in fact the greatest of
them always are," he defended. "There was Voltaire, the successful
watchmaker at Ferney ... and there was Shakespeare, who, after his
success in London, returned to Avon and practically bought up the whole
town ... he even ran a butcher shop there, you know."

* * * * *

"The people expect startling things ... and, as the winds of genius blow
where they list--when they refuse to blow in the direction required,
divine is the art of buncombe," he jested.

I suppose this applied to his musician-prodigy, a girl of eight, who
worked, in the afternoons, in the bindery. And when a visiting party
swept through that department, it was part of her job to rise as if
under the impulse of inspiration, leave her work, and go to a nearby
piano and play ... the implication being that the piano was placed there
for the use of the workers when melody surged within them....

But she was the only one who played. And she never played except when
she was tipped the wink. And it was only one thing--a something of
Rubenstein's ... which she had practised and practised and practised to
perfection; and _that_ rendered, with haughty head l