In meeting friends new or old the sculptor’s outstanding trait was his unworldly attitude, totally unaffected by praise or blame, by newspaper gossip or radio commentators. This is exemplified in a story that he used to tell on himself. During his early days in New York the actress Blanche Bates, who had known him in California, invited him to a matinee where he found himself the lone male in a box of women. He noticed that opera glasses were being turned on the box, presumably because of the exceptional beauty of the woman beside him, and tactfully he withdrew into the background. As he was filing out after the performance he overtook Miss Bates and asked, “Who was that striking woman sitting next to me?” Her laugh was spontaneous as she called to her friend, “Oh, Lillian, here’s one man in the world who never heard of you!” He had been spending the afternoon with the most glamorous woman in the world, Lillian Russell, and he hadn’t realized it. He was not embarrassed. He never liked to be told in advance the names and positions of people he was likely to meet. “I don’t care to be hampered by other people’s opinions--or guesses,” he said. “I like to discover people for themselves. And I do.” “You certainly do,” conceded Miss Bates. And, of course, he did. CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE _SHRINE OF DEMOCRACY_ A monument’s dimensions should be determined by the importance to civilization of the events memorialized.--GUTZON BORGLUM. Back to the mountains came the boy who had felt kinship for them more than half a century before, to put into form a dream that was as yet nebulous and disturbed. Vaguely he felt that he was going to preserve forever some symbol of a great national ideal. The trouble was that he did not yet have an inkling of what the symbol looked like or how he was going to keep it intact for future generations to look at. And he had the granite--the living rock of the mountains--that would turn the weather as it had been turning it for thousands of years. It would keep what he carved on it down through time to the rim of eternity. It sprang from the Stone Mountain conception, this project. But it wouldn’t be the same thing. There would be no army of horsemen riding across the white face of a cliff. For this, as he knew but found it hard to express, must provide a quick glance at the history of the whole republic, and not until he had accomplished it did he find the words. He said: