The names of the artists meant nothing to me, I cared only for their works, looking long at what interested me. I remember especially “The Gathering of the Potatoes,” a huge, sad painting that, as I recall it, had much of the dreary realism I have since seen in “The Angelus” and “The Gleaners.” The haunting sadness of that painting, the sombre sky, the peasants in the foreground, the woman holding open the bag while the man poured in the potatoes--they seemed to be counting each one of the scanty store! The homely pathos of their lives moved me then, and it all comes back to me now. There was much else that moved me, but I was irritated, too, for that same facetious girl went around nudging others and giggling over the complete anatomy of the Cupids and Cherubs, frankly portrayed. I detested this singling out of such things and talking about them. Prim as I was, I saw nothing to object to in those charming figures; and it was painful to have my enjoyment desecrated by these silly observations. To this day I have no patience with persons who cannot view the nude in art without low-minded comments (or thoughts) on what seems to fill their entire field of vision to the exclusion of the work as a whole. I once showed a vulgar-minded woman a picture of a beautiful, three-year old child, nude--a thing so lovely I thought it must appeal even to her; but she was scandalized at the pearl I had cast before her. She began a tirade against “such things,” her unique argument being: “The sight of means to do ill deeds, makes ill deeds done.” I thought that Shakespeare would have risked his own curse and, moving his bones, would almost have risen to confront her, could he have heard his lines so perversely misapplied! A year or two after our visit to Power’s Art Gallery, I had my next glimpse of art in Boston. But neither the Fine Arts Museum there, nor those in other cities since, produced upon me the profound impression that my first excursion into the world of Art produced. CHAPTER VI “BRED IN THE BONE” Whether due to my reading, or almost wholly to observations and conclusions, I cannot say, but I began early to feel the potency of heredity; to lament certain tendencies in my kindred which I saw cropping out in myself, and to realize the gravity of marrying and having offspring. I saw my grandfather’s ungovernable temper exaggerated in one of his daughters and in my brother; saw in myself, though naturally of a mild disposition, a tendency to give away, on occasion, to intense anger; saw queer traits in aunts and cousins that frightened me; knew that tuberculosis had attacked some members of my father’s family; that certain cousins on both sides were neurotic; that my maternal grandmother had carcinoma; that a cousin was an epileptic; and that on both sides were intemperate uncles--these were the chief reasons contributing to my early, deep-seated resolution never to marry.