On an average of twice a month during my stay in St. Louis I was called to this building on one errand and another, and always I went with a sicky and sinking sensation, and always I came away from it breathing a sigh of relief. To me it was a horrible place, a pest-hole of suffering and error and trickery, and yet necessary enough, I know. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XXI I WAS walking down the marble hall of our editorial floor one day not long after I arrived when I noted on a door at its extreme end the words: “Art Department.” The _Globe_ in Chicago had no art department, at least I never discovered it. The mere word _art_, although I had no real understanding of it, was fascinating to me. Was it not on every tongue? A man who painted or drew was an artist; Doré was one, for instance, and Rembrandt. (I classed the two together.) In Chicago I had of course known that each paper should have an art department, and that interested me in this one. What were artists like? I had never known one. Another day I was on my way to the lavatory when I discovered that I had come away without the key, a duplicate of which every department possessed. The art department door being nearest, I entered to borrow theirs. Behold, three distinctive if not distinguished looking individuals at work upon drawings laid upon drawing-boards. Two of these looked up, the one nearest me with a look of criticism in his eye, I thought. The one who answered me when I asked for the key, and who swiftly arose to get it for me, was short and stocky, with bushy, tramp-like hair and beard. There was something that savored of opera bouffe about him, and yet, as I could see, he took himself seriously enough. There was something pleasing in his voice too as he said, “Certainly; here it is,” and smiled. The one who had looked up at first and frowned but made no move was much less cheery. I recall the long, thin, sallow face, the coal-black hair, long and coarse, which was parted most carefully in the middle and slicked down at the sides and back over the ears until it looked as though it had been oiled, and the eyes, black and small and querulous and petulant, as was the mouth, with drawn lines at each corner, as though he had endured much pain. That long, loose, flowing black tie! And that soft white or blue or green or brown linen shirt!—would any Quartier Latin denizen have been without them? He had thin, pale bony hands, long and graceful, and an air of “touch thou me not, O defiled one.” The man appealed to and repelled me at a glance, appealing to me much more later, and ever remained a human humoresque, something to coddle, endure, decipher, laugh at. Surely Dick Wood, or “Richard Wood, Artist,” as his card read, might safely be placed in any pantheon of the unconventionally ridiculous and delicious.