There was another artist with a studio across the bridges, and his love of art cost him much money and some severe trials. His suite of rooms was all in blue, gray, white, and black. He said that if you looked at things in the world properly, you would see that they were all gray, blue, or black. He had painted a gray lady in a gray dress, with a blue parrot on her shoulder. She had brown lips and grayish teeth. He was very much disappointed in me when I told him that lips always looked to me either pink or red. He explained by saying that my eyes were not trained properly. I resented this, and told him that my eyes were as good as his own, and that a recruiting officer had once tested them with colored yarns and letters of the alphabet held up in inaccessible corners, and had given me a higher mark for eyesight than for anything else. He said it was not a question of colored yarns; and that while I might satisfy a recruiting sergeant that I could distinguish an ammunition train from a travelling circus, it did not render me a critic on art matters. He pointed out that the eyes of the women in the Caucasus who make rugs are trained to distinguish a hundred and eighty different shades of colors that other eyes cannot see; and in time, he added, I would see that everything in real life looked flat and gray. I took a red carnation out of my coat, and put it over the gray lady's lips, and asked him whether he would call it gray or red, and he said that was no argument. He suffered a great deal in his efforts to live up to his ideas, but assured me that he was much happier than I in my ignorance of what was beautiful. He explained, for instance, that he would like to put up some of the photographs of his family that he had brought with him around his room, but that he could not do it, because photographs were so undecorative. So he kept them in his trunk. He also kept a green cage full of doves because they were gray and white and decorative, and in spite of the fact that they were a nuisance, and always flying away, and being caught again by small boys, who brought them back, and wanted a franc for so doing. He suffered, too, in his inability to find the shade of blue for his chair covers that would harmonize with the rest of his room. He covered the furniture five times, and never successfully, and hence the cushions of his lounge and stiff chairs were still as white as when they had last gone to the upholsterer's.