The blindness keeps one looking again. One cannot quite believe it. The portrait has something so strong, so almost noble and commanding, about it that one cannot but stand back with one's little judgments and give the man who can hurl together out of the bewilderment of the world a personality like this, and fix it here--all in one small human face--the benefit of the doubt. This is the way the crowd has always taken Pierpont Morgan at first. The bare spectacle of a man so magnificently set, so imperiously preoccupied, silences our judgments. It seems as if, of course, he must be seeing things--things that we and others possibly do not and cannot see. The blindness in the eyes is so complete and set in such a full array that it acts at first on one almost like a kind of vision. The eyes hold themselves like pictures of eyes, like little walls, as if real eyes were in behind them. One wonders if there is any one who could ever manage to break through them, fleck up little ordinary human things--personality, for instance, atmosphere, or light--against them. If Shakespeare, whose folios he has, and Keats, whose "Endymion" he owns, or Milton, whose "Paradise Lost" he keeps in his safe, were all to assail him at once, were to bear down upon that set look in Pierpont Morgan's eyes--try to get them to turn one side a second and notice that they--Shakespeare and Milton and Keats--were there, there would not be a flicker or shadow of movement. They are eyes that are set like jaws, like magnificent spiritual muscles, on Something. Neither do they reveal light or receive it. * * * * *