arty
admiration for the Germans, all their ways, conservatisms, their
breweries, food and such things, and finally wound up by marrying a
German girl.

As far as I could make out, Peter had no faith in anything except Nature
itself, and very little in that except in those aspects of beauty and
accident and reward and terrors with which it is filled and for which he
had an awe if not a reverence and in every manifestation of which he
took the greatest delight. Life was a delicious, brilliant mystery to
him, horrible in some respects, beautiful in others; a great adventure.
Unlike myself at the time, he had not the slightest trace of any
lingering Puritanism, and wished to live in a lush, vigorous, healthy,
free, at times almost barbaric, way. The negroes, the ancient Romans,
the Egyptians, tales of the Orient and the grotesque Dark Ages, our own
vile slums and evil quarters--how he reveled in these! He was for nights
of wandering, endless investigation, reading, singing, dancing, playing!

Apropos of this I should like to relate here that one of his seemingly
gross but really innocent diversions was occasionally visiting a certain
black house of prostitution, of which there were many in St. Louis. Here
while he played a flute and some one else a tambourine or small drum, he
would have two or three of the inmates dance in some weird savage way
that took one instanter to the wilds of Central Africa. There was, so
far as I know, no payment of any kind made in connection with this. He
was a friend, in some crude, artistic or barbaric way. He satisfied, I
am positive, some love of color, sound and the dance in these queer
revels.

Nor do I know how he achieved these friendships, such as they were. I
was never with him when he did. But aside from the satiation they
afforded his taste for the strange and picturesque, I am sure they
reflected no gross or sensual appetite. But I wish to attest in passing
that the mere witnessing of these free scenes had a tonic as well as
toxic effect on me. As I view myself now, I was a poor, spindling,
prying fish, anxious to know life, and yet because of my very narrow
training very fearsome of it, of what it might do to me, what dreadful
contagion of thought or deed it might open me to! Peter was not so. To
him all, positively _all_, life was good. It was a fascinating
spectacle, to be studied or observed and rejoiced in as a spectacle.
When I look back now on the shabby, poorly-lighted, l