So far as I could make out from watching this throng the principal idea was to be able to say that they had been abroad. Poor old Florence! Its beauty and its social significance passed unrecognized. Art, so far as I could judge from the really unmoved spectators present, was for crazy people. The artist was some weird, spindling, unfortunate fool, a little daft perhaps, but tolerable for a strange furore he seemed to have created. Great men made and used him. He was, after his fashion, a servant. The objectionable feature of a picture like Botticelli’s “Spring” would be the nudity of the figures! From a Rubens or a nude Raphael we lead brash, unctuous, self-conscious Mary away in silence. If we encounter, perchance, quite unexpectedly a “Leda” by Michelangelo or a too nude “Assumption” by Bronzino, we turn away in disgust. Art must be limited to conventional theories and when so limited is not worth much anyhow. It was amazing to see them strutting in and out, their good clothes rustling, an automobile in waiting, noisily puffing the while they gather aimless “impressions” wherewith to browbeat their neighbors. George and Henry and Mary and Anabel, protesting half the time or in open rebellion, are duly led to see the things which have been the most enthusiastically recommended, be they palaces or restaurants. I often wondered what it was--the best--which these people got out of their trip abroad. The heavy Germans I saw I always suspected of having solid Teutonic understanding and appreciation of everything; the English were uniformly polite, reserved, intelligent, apparently discriminating. But these Americans! If you told them the true story of Antinous, whose head I saw them occasionally admiring; or forced upon them the true details of the Borgias, the Sforzas, the Medici, or even the historical development of Art, they would fly in horror. They have no room in their little crania for anything save their own notions,--the standards of the Methodist Church at Keokuk. I think, sometimes, perhaps it is because we are all growing to a different standard, trying to make life something different from what it has always been, or appeared to be, that all the trouble comes about. Time will remedy that. Life,--its heavy, interminable processes,--will break any theory. I conceive of life as a blind goddess, pouring from separate jars, one of which she holds in each hand, simultaneously, the streams of good and evil, which mingling, make this troubled existence, flowing ever onward to the sea. It was also while I was at Florence that I finally decided to change my plan and visit Venice. “It is a city without a disappointment,” a publisher-friend of mine had one time assured me, with the greatest confidence. And so, here at Florence, on this first morning, I altered my plans; I changed my ticket at Thomas Cook’s and crowded Venice in between Florence and Milan. I gave myself a stay of four days, deciding to lengthen it if I chose.