to me, but I still have this temperament. A man
clings desperately to the last remnants of his heritage.

The artist's soul is a reality. I admitted that. But it is also a
disease. I had learned to believe in it as a man learns to believe in
influenza when his temperature runs up to 104 degrees and his bones ache
furiously. But there is a difference between admitting the existence of
a disease and deliberately cultivating the germs of it.

I crossed 5th Avenue at 32nd Street in great peril of my life, for the
traffic at that point is as wild as the emotions of the artistic soul.

It came into my mind that quite possibly the thrills and throbs which
Mrs. Ascher enjoys, of which I myself had a brief and mild experience,
are not only real, but worth while. There may after all be something
greater in the world than common sense. I fell to dreaming of what life
might be like to the man who refused to take it as it is, who insisted
on seeing above him, not silly little twinkling stars, but great worlds
coursing through the infinite spaces of eternity. I ran into a boy
carrying books, while I was thinking about eternity. His books were
scattered over the pavement and I hurt my knee. I decided that my faint
longing for what Mrs. Ascher would call "higher possibilities" is a
temptation, something to be conquered. I finished my meditation with a
"Retro Satanas" and returned to my hotel for luncheon, confident that I
should come out victor in my struggle.

Ascher has certainly far more determination and force of character
than I have; but he does not seem able to break himself of the habit of
making money. His wife says that he hates doing it and wants to stop.
But he goes on doing it. He has formed a habit of making money, and
habit is almost unconquerable. It was plainly the path of wisdom for me
to check my tendency towards art at the very beginning, not to allow the
habit of feeling artistically, indeed of feeling at all, to form itself.

CHAPTER VII.

I had no idea of breaking the promise I made Mrs. Ascher; but I felt
a certain hesitation about entering again the Holiest of Holies in the
office of Ascher, Stutz & Co. I was a little afraid of Stutz, who seemed
to me a severe man, very little tolerant of human folly. Still I would
have faced Stutz without shrinking, especially in a good cause. What I
really disliked was the idea of suggesting a business policy to
Ascher. The man was immeasurably my superior in natur