The gambler and I went away to stand by a fence. Were men less fortunate than horses? Did men also seek but to express themselves beautifully as in a few minutes now the horse would do? The gambler’s body trembled as did my own. When the horse ran (he broke the record for the mile, that day) he and I did not speak to each other. We had together seen something we together loved. Was it enough? “At least,” I told myself, “we men have a kind of consciousness that perhaps the horses haven’t. We have this consciousness of one another. That is what love is, perhaps.” There was a child, a young boy of fourteen walking beside his mother in a park at Cleveland, Ohio. I sat on a bench there and saw him go by and after that one moment of his passing never saw him again but I’ll never forget while I live. The moment was like the moment of the running of the horse. Could it be that it was the boy’s most beautiful moment? Well, I had seen it. Why was I not made to be a painter? The boy’s head was thrown a little back, he had black curly hair and carried his hat in his hand. In just that moment of his passing the bench on which I sat his young body was all alive, all of the senses fully alive. Whose son was he? Such a living thing as that, to be thrown into the life of Cleveland, Ohio or of Paris or Venice either for that matter. I am always having those moments of checking up like a miser closing the shutters of his house at night to count his gold before he goes to bed and although there are many notes on which I might close this book on my own imaginative life in America, it seems to me good enough to close it just there as I sat that day before Chartres Cathedral beside a man I had come to love and in the presence of that cathedral that had made me more deeply happy than any other work of art I had ever seen. My friend kept pretending to read his book but from time to time I saw how his eyes followed the old tower of the church and the gladness that came into him too. We would both soon be going back to America to our separate places there. We wanted to go, wanted to take our chances of getting what we could out of our own lives in our own places. We did not want to spend our lives living in the past, dreaming over the dead past of a Europe from which we were separated by a wide ocean. Americans with cultural impulses had done too much of that sort of thing in the past. The game was worn out and even a ladies’ literary society in an Iowa city was coming to know that a European artist of the present day was not necessarily of importance just because he was a European. The future of the western world lay with America. Everyone knew that. In Europe they knew it better than they did in America. It was for me a morning of such thoughts, such memories--just there before Chartres with my friend.