Isadora, her brother and sister had come from California after their father’s death. August Borglum, Gutzon’s brother, was a guest at the party and always recalled the impression Miss Duncan made as she danced out from the studio onto the lawn, scattering red rose petals that she had been gathering in the villa garden. Isadora, Gutzon observed, brought an active revival of memories from home. “The fresh western breeze that came with her,” he said, filled him with nostalgia. Very likely it did. Shortly afterward he had gone over to Paris and was standing idly on a street corner. It was a day like any other in his life except that he had had a brief meeting with a casual American tourist in a café, and that there was an unusual amount of cash in his pocket. Suddenly there came to him an irresistible urge to return to the United States--to go home. All his pent-up irritation over spiritual repressions and his grievance over decadent art conditions in Europe surged over him at once. He leaped at a passing [Illustration: “ABRAHAM LINCOLN” This statue, in front of the Newark courthouse, was Borglum’s own favorite.] [Illustration: GUTZON AND MARY BORGLUM] cab, offered double fare if he could get to the Gare du Nord in time for the boat train ... and so, presently, he had passed through Cherbourg and was on a ship headed for America. This ended an era in his life and marked, definitely, the beginning of another. He was never to return to Europe except for the placing of work he had produced in the United States. CHAPTER SEVEN _QUIET IN NEW YORK_ The first thing Gutzon Borglum did in New York was to join--or, perhaps, originate--a movement whose object was to make American art distinctive and national. This was a bit out of the ordinary. Gutzon, so far as he had expressed himself, hadn’t much concern about American art. What he had seen of it annoyed him, and he didn’t intend to give much time to its promotion. He was presently to return to England ... but somehow he could never find time to book a passage. In the early days of the twentieth century his journal mentions, and many of us unfortunately remember, European and classic influences were dominant in art. Our public buildings were often Greek or Roman temples adorned with sculpture right out of Homer’s mythology. In New York the extreme example of this tendency was a building erected by some art society on Lexington Avenue which was decorated across the front with a frieze from the Parthenon in Athens. The New York version of the frieze was so exact as to include all the mutilations that the march of hundreds of years had inflicted on the original.