And fifty other artists of whom the world will hear some day (or never) have accepted the invitation of Elvin Williams and have joined her happy family in the Paint Box. And she, herself? No, she has not short hair. She is not an old maid, not eccentric. Nothing wrong with her. A charming young woman, even dressed as any other one above Fourteenth Street. She had an idea, she said. The idea seems to work out all right. 1919 President Harding’s Favorite Book President-elect Harding was, and is, a newspaper man. Thank God for that. He knows life as it is, and as it appears to be in the press. The man who knows how to read our newspapers has won half of the battle. And newspaper men are generous and excellent judges of men. Harding smokes cigarettes. This puts him in a different class. Look out for the man who warns you against cigarettes. Who tells you (on offering him your case) with a superior smile: “Thanks, I don’t use them.” Sometimes I will sing a song of hate against those black cigars of the sedate and of the respectable. I loathe the cigar of the habitual smoker, so justly characterized by Schopenhauer as a stimulant of thought for people who do not think. Not one smoker of cigarettes ever arrives at that low level of enjoyment. To smoke a cigar is not much more than a hobby. The cigarette is a passion, a vice. The cigarette is intoxicating. If one inhales the aromatic smoke, draws it deep into one’s lungs, into blood and nerves, one feels that this narcotic wonder-poison liberates the soul from a profane pressure, and one’s spirit is lured to lighter and brighter regions. Intoxication is the sweet magic of the cigarette, and, therefore, the cigarette is inseparable from all extravagant enjoyments. The cigarette is in the gambling den. It can be found always where they drink champagne. It is a part of frivolity, of sin, of the poetry of enjoyment. Its aromatic fragrance, the tender rings that vanish swiftly into grotesque figures.... The cigarette is the perfume of the boudoir. The cigarette smoker never looks for a stronger brand, as the consumer of cigars, who methodically tans his tongue with his weed. The cigarette smoker increases his daily ration, and finally smokes between the courses of his meal, between his kisses.... In the green room of theatre and concert room, you can see him hungrily reaching for his silver case, the gift of his beloved. He awakens in the night and lights his cigarette, and what peace and joy after each long draught of the sweet redeeming bewilderment. That’s quite different from that brown, ill-smelling butt, chewed from one corner of the mouth to the other, lighted again and again, until it has happily dissolved itself into ashes. A bedroom filled with smoke: a long story of enlightenment to the one who knows. The cigarette fits in our nervous times. A nervous pleasure for a nervous people. We smoke cigarettes because we are nervous. We are nervous because we smoke cigarettes.