“Well?” says my friend. You see he is fairly hanging on my words, as the saying goes; in short, he is waiting for me to speak with the air of one about to be hanged. Why? The devil! Why does he put everything up to me? One gets tired carrying such responsibility upon one’s shoulders. A painter should be the judge of his own work and not embarrass his fellow painters by asking questions. That is my method. Very well then. If I speak sharply you have only yourself to blame. “The yellow you have been using is a little muddy. The arm of this woman is not felt. In painting one should feel the arm of a woman. What I advise is that you change your palette. You have scattered too much. Pull it together. A painting should stick together as a wet snow ball thrown by a boy clings to a wall.” When I had reached the age of thirty, that is to say two years ago, I received from my aunt, the sister of my father to be exact, a small fortune I had long been dreaming I might possibly inherit. My aunt I had never seen, but I had always been saying to myself, “I must go see my aunt. The old lady will be sore at me and when she dies will not leave me a cent.” And then, lucky fellow that I am, I did go to see her just before she died. Filled with determination to put the thing through I set out from Chicago, and it is not my fault that I did not spend the day with her. Even although my aunt is (as I am not fool enough not to know that you know) a woman I would have spent the day with her but that it was impossible. She lived at Madison, Wisconsin, and I went there on Saturday morning. The house was locked and the windows boarded up. Fortunately, at just that moment, a mail carrier came along and, upon my telling him that I was my aunt’s nephew, gave me her address. He also gave me some news concerning her. For years she had been a sufferer from hay-fever and every summer had to have a change of climate. That was an opportunity for me. I went at once to a hotel and wrote her a letter telling of my visit and expressing, to the utmost of my ability, my sorrow in not having found her at home. “I have been a long time doing this job but now that I am at it I fancy I shall do it rather well,” I said to myself. A sort of feeling came into my hand, as it were. I can’t just say what it was but as soon as I sat down I knew very well I should be eloquent. For the moment I was positively a poet. In the first place, and as one should in writing a letter to a lady, I spoke of the sky. “The sky is full of mottled clouds,” I said. Then, and I frankly admit in a brutally casual way, I spoke of myself as one practically prostrated with grief. To tell the truth I did not just know what I was doing. I had got the fever for writing words, you see. They fairly flowed out of my pen.