ore interested in this than in the social and economic sides of the
lives of the Chinese, and was constantly urging Dick to take him here,
there and everywhere in order that he might see for himself what of
these amazing wonders were locally extant, leading Dick in the process a
merry chase and a dog's life. Dick was compelled to persuade nearly all
of his boasted friends to produce all they had to show. Once, I recall,
a collection of rare Chinese porcelains being shown at the local museum
of art, there was nothing for it but that Dick must get one or more of
his Oriental friends to interpret this, that and the other symbol in
connection with this, that and the other vase--things which put him to
no end of trouble and which led to nothing, for among all the local
Chinese there was not one who knew anything about it, although they,
Dick included, were not honest enough to admit it.

"You know, Dreiser," Peter said to me one day with the most delicious
gleam of semi-malicious, semi-tender humor, "I am really doing all this
just to torture Dick. He doesn't know a damned thing about it and
neither do these Chinese, but it's fun to haul 'em out there and make
'em sweat. The museum sells an illustrated monograph covering all this,
you know, with pictures of the genuinely historic pieces and
explanations of the various symbols in so far as they are known, but
Dick doesn't know that, and he's lying awake nights trying to find out
what they're all about. I like to see his expression and that of those
chinks when they examine those things." He subsided with a low chuckle
all the more disturbing because it was so obviously the product of
well-grounded knowledge.

Another phase of this same humor related to the grand artistic, social
and other forms of life to which Dick was hoping to ascend via marriage
and which led him, because of a kind of anticipatory eagerness, into all
sorts of exaggerations of dress, manners, speech, style in writing or
drawing, and I know not what else. He had, as I have said, a "studio" in
Broadway, an ordinary large, square upper chamber of an old residence
turned commercial but which Dick had decorated in the most, to him,
recherche or _different_ manner possible. In Dick's gilding imagination
it was packed with the rarest and most carefully selected things, odd
bits of furniture, objects of art, pictures, books--things which the
ordinary antique shop provides in plenty but which to Dick, having been