What about the men of New York, the writers whose work I admired, the painters whose work I admired? I had always wanted to be a painter myself, was always having sensations and seeing forms that could perhaps have been expressed in paint and in no other way but the materials of the painter’s craft seemed to me to lie far outside my way of life. One had to know drawing, to know what green did to yellow and yellow to brown. When one talked to painters they spoke of things that lay far outside one’s pathway. There had been one painter I had known quite well. He had lived in a room near my own in Chicago and painted landscapes. Rather he painted one landscape over and over. There was an old stone building that looked like pictures one had seen of peasants’ cottages. It was evening and two cows were coming home along a road, to a barn one fancied, but the barn could not be seen for the deep shadows that had gathered behind the house. Then there were some trees, the tops of which could be but faintly seen on the horizon. The last rays of the sun had splashed the sky with red. Often in the evening the painter, a large man with red hair, came into my room and spoke to me. He also had been touched with the new day and had read Paul Gauguin’s notebook and a work by Mr. Clive Bell. “The new fellows have nothing on me,” he declared and taking me into his room he showed me half a dozen of his canvases and how that in one the tops of the trees could just be seen above the roof of the house and in another that there were really no trees at all. “What you think is trees is only clouds,” he declared, “and what you think is the sun going down is really the moon coming up.” Returning with me to my room he had talked so long and well of the effect of light on color, of form and its significance, of the new cubistic and post-impressionistic movements, the import and significance of which he declared scornfully he had measured and for the most part discarded, that I became frightened and did not for years afterwards try to paint. Once in Chicago I went into a store, intending to buy some colors with which to play at idle moments in my room but a certain air of the clerk had frightened me. My own father, when he was alive, had often received from manufacturers certain cards on which the house-painter’s colors were shown and the trade name of each color printed below and I had thought I might find such a card lying on a counter in the art store but saw none and was ashamed to ask. Perhaps I wanted the clerk to think me a painter who knew his craft. How glibly the red-haired man had reeled off the names of colors. I was like one who has wandered into a church where people are kneeling in prayer. I began walking on tiptoes. “I only wanted to buy a pencil eraser,” I said. And so now there I was in the city of New York and there were certain men in the city to whom I would have liked to go, to talk with them of my craft, but when I thought of doing so I was afraid.