When he got these blue streaks he had the habit of coming down to The Players, finding me, and saying: “Now, Simmy, you must help me. Order anything you want, on me, but stay right here and talk to me.” I suppose the sound of my voice was, for him, like Vergil’s bees in the lime trees—a susurrus. The talk was anything and everything. Sometimes a discussion about a college education—as to whether Lincoln would have been the same if he had had one, etc., etc. I told him once about my discovery that every man, secretly and in his own soul, thought himself the ideal type of human being. An art class in Boston had been given as a subject for Saturday afternoon an ideal head of a young Greek. The results were placed on easels, and I easily picked out the author of each drawing from its resemblance to himself. Then Gussie remembered that in Italy there was a humpback in the class with him who made everything deformed. In Chicago, where I went at one time to consult Daniel Burnham, I met Saint-Gaudens and McKim. To my astonishment, they had come to collect money to start an academy at Rome. They raised about one hundred thousand dollars, I believe, and this was the beginning. I always have been and still am opposed to formal organizations, and an academy seemed to me just another of the same kind. I couldn’t see Gussie in this position and asked: “_Que fais tu donc dans cette galère?_” His reply was very logical. “No, I don’t, but when I was a boy I wanted to learn sculpture. If there had been an academy in Rome at that time, I could have gotten studio, materials, models, and all that I wanted for nothing. Let Chicago and everybody subscribe. Who are they, anyway? After one hundred years, the money will have been well spent if only one artist—say a Michael Angelo—is helped to get what he needs.” He was willing to sacrifice the whole pig-killing town if one genius could be helped. All the oil wells of Texas would not be worth, to our descendants, one poem like the “Ode to a Grecian Urn.”