"Well, you chuck it just as soon as you can. I'll put this thing through somehow. We'll clear out of here." He had his pipe alight by now and began puffing more contentedly. "I don't think much of this burg anyway," he laughed as he settled himself in one of my chairs. "A man doesn't have a chance to get his feet on the ground." There were times when he almost made me share in his distaste for it. That was when I had drawn him into the circle of my professional acquaintances which somehow shrivelled at his touch like spiders in the heat. Understand that I hold by my art, that I have poured myself a libation on that altar, that I value it above all other means of expressing the drama of man's relation to the Invisible, and that I do not think you do enough for it, prize it enough, or use it rightly. But I suppose there is a yellow streak in me, or I wouldn't sicken so as I do at what it brings to pass in the personalities by which it is most forwarded. For since it must be that art cannot be served to the world, except by a cup emptied of much that is most desirable in the recipients, it ill becomes them as long as they fatten their souls at it, to take exception to the vessel from which it is drunk. Nevertheless I used to find myself, when Helmeth was with me, sniffing at the spiritual garments of my friends for the smell of burning. I resented Mr. Lawrence the most; it was not altogether for the incongruity of his possessing Sarah, her fine smudgeless personality and her lovely body, delicate and shapely as a pearl, but for the incontestable evidence he offered me of how low I had stooped. From the peak of my present prosperity, my troubles in Chicago, showed the merest accident, and the distance I had sprung away from them seemed somehow expressive of the strength with which I had sprung from all that Lawrence represented. Not all the care Sarah bestowed on him--and I think the best he could do for her was to provide her in his impaired health with an occasion for mothering--could quite distract the attention from the ineradicable mark of his cheapness.