Whenever I see Fergus I have a slight quickening of the sense of life. His rich and rather somber personality makes all ordinary backgrounds tawdry. He knows so exactly what he is doing and what he is feeling. I do not think he reads very much, but he breathes in from the air around him certain large aesthetic and philosophical ideas. There are many philosophies and many artists, however, that he has never heard of, and this ignorance of the concrete gives one a fine pleasure of impressing him. One can pour into receptive ears judgments and enthusiasms that have long ago been taken for granted by one’s more sophisticated friends. His taste in art as in music is impeccable, and veers strongly to the classics--Rembrandt and the Greeks, as Bach and Beethoven. Fergus has been in love, but he does not talk much about it. A girl in his words is somewhat dark and inscrutable. She always has something haunting and finely-toned about her, whoever she may be. I always think of the clothed lady in the flowing silks, in Titian’s “Sacred and Profane Love.” Yet withal Fergus gives her a touch of the allurement of her nude companion. His reserve, I think, always keeps these persons very dusky and distant. His chastity is a result of his fineness of taste rather than of feeble desire or conscious control. That impersonal passion which descends on people like Fergus in a sultry cloud he tells me he contrives to work off into his violin. I sometimes wonder if a little more of it with a better violin would have made him an artist. But destiny has just clipped his wings so that he must live a life of noble leisure instead of artistic creation. His unconscious interest is the art of life. Against a background of Harlem flats and stodgy bourgeois prejudices he works out this life of _otium cum dignitate_, calm speculation and artistic appreciation that Nietzsche glorifies. On any code that would judge him by the seven dollars a week which is perhaps his average income he looks with cold disdain. He does not demand that the world give him a living. He did not ask to come into it, but being here he will take it with candor. Sometimes I think he is very patient with life. Probably he is not happy. This is not important. As his candor and his appreciations refresh me, I wonder if the next best thing to producing works of art is not to be, like Fergus, a work of art one’s self. THE PROFESSOR The Professor is a young man, but he had so obviously the misfortune of growing up too early that he seems already like a mournful relic of irrevocable days. His ardent youth was spent in that halcyon time of the early nineteen-hundreds when all was innocence in the heart of young America. “When I was in college,” the Professor often says, “all this discussion of social questions was unknown to us. The growing seriousness of the American college student is an inspiring phenomenon in our contemporary life.”