Mrs. Van Rensselaer wrote a long article somewhere about the Madison Square building and gushed about that rare quality in the architects who would go so far as even to vary the color of their bricks in constructing the tower, so as to give it variance of tonality. This seemed to me improbable, and one day I asked Meade about it. He said it was “rot,” that if one of the brickmakers had not gone bankrupt, the tower would have been the same color all the way up. I commented upon the hideous color of the combination of brickwork and terra cotta produced both in this building and in the Herald Building at Thirty-fifth Street. Stanny told me not to be silly, but to wait until they were twenty years old. Remembering it the other day, I looked, and, behold! the tonality and color in the Madison Square building had come together like smoothing velvet. The first attempt at the statue on the top failed by reason of the fact that the drapery which flew from the shoulder, and served as a tail or rudder, did not accomplish its purpose of turning her arrow into the eye of the wind. Saint-Gaudens (the sculptor) and Stanny spent some thousands of dollars in taking it down and making a new one. The second worked as a weathercock, but, alas! it was not half so beautiful. To-day the drapery over which they spent so much time and money is gone. So much does America care for its art and its artists! One should not judge Stanford White’s ability as an architect by the Washington Arch which stands at the foot of Fifth Avenue. The temporary arch which preceded this one was put up in lath and plaster—staff—to celebrate a memorial occasion, and was rarely beautiful in structure and proportion. The city fathers asked him to reproduce it for permanence in marble. He told them it could not be done, but after much argument he gave in. I suppose it was a question of bearing power or stress, but he did not succeed. Very few men have ever been able to alter—to their own satisfaction, or to that of the public—their first inspiration. A “dub” can; an artist can’t. The Washington Arch stands to-day, as many other buildings in America do, a monument to the interference with an artist’s dream.