be expecting another . . . You say
that I am a pretty one to give advice, for I am always chopping and
changing myself. Well, from the time you were a little boy, did I ever
give you but one sort of advice? I have been constant in that. And as
to myself, you are unjust. I have always had one distinct object in
life, and that I have pursued. I wanted to find out about life, to have
experience, and then do what I could do best, and what needed most to be
done. Why did I not stick to teaching in that woman's college? Well, I
began to have doubts, I began to experiment on my pupils. You will
laugh, but I will give you a specimen. One day I put a question to my
literature class, and I found out that not one of them knew how to boil
potatoes. They were all getting an education, and hardly one of them
knew how much the happiness of a home depends upon having the potatoes
mealy and not soggy. It was so in everything. How are we going to live
when we are all educated, without knowing how to live? Then I found that
the masses here in New York did not know any better than the classes how
to live. Don't think it is just a matter of cooking. It is knowing how,
generally, to make the most of yourself and of your opportunities, and
have a nice world to live in, a thrifty, self-helpful, disciplined world.
Is education giving us this? And then we think that organization will do
it, organization instead of self-development. We think we can organize
life, as they are trying to organize art. They have organized art as
they have the production of cotton.

"Did I tell you I was in that? No? I used to draw in school, and after
I had worked in the Settlement here in New York, and while I was working
down on the East Side, it came over me that maybe I had one talent
wrapped in a napkin; and I have been taking lessons in Fifty-seventh
Street with the thousand or two young women who do not know how to boil
potatoes, but are pursuing the higher life of art. I did not tell you
this because I knew you would say that I am just as inconsistent as you
are. But I am not. I have demonstrated the fact that neither I nor one
in a hundred of those charming devotees to art could ever earn a living
by art, or do anything except to add to the mediocrity of the amazing art
product of this free country.

"And you will ask, what now? I am going on in the same way. I am going
to be a doctor. In college I was very well up in physiology and anatomy,
and I went quit