Yet it is not the problematic value to others of the knowledge these expatriated Americans acquire nor their slight influence upon international relations that appears to me their real importance, but what they have, quietly and almost unconsciously, done with themselves. The few individuals of this sort whom it is my privilege to know seem to me more fully developed, rounded, and, especially, grown-up than they could possibly have become except through this way of living. I have even now more friends, if vastly fewer acquaintances, in America than in Europe, but not one among them is as mature and mellowed as are these expatriates. They have, the latter, a tolerance, an illusionless sympathy for mankind and an insight into human motives. They see men solely as individuals. Take, for example, my friend Etheredge (that is not his name). In a way it is not fair to do this, since, to my mind at least, he is so very much more of a person than any of the few other expatriates of this sort whom I know as to be uncharacteristic. Nevertheless, he could not have become what he seems to me to be without his many years of living abroad, and also there is something to be said for taking not the average but the finest exceptional result as a study of a type. I first met Etheredge fourteen years ago, shortly after he had come to live in Europe. He happens to be a painter (as also is his wife), but I am not myself capable of judging as to whether he is a good painter or not. Some of his pictures (which become increasingly abstract) move me; some do not. I have heard supposedly competent critics say that they were very good indeed, and others, equally expert, that they were very poor. To tell the truth, I do not care in the least which they are. By all American Standards Etheredge would, I suppose, be accounted a failure, since he can hardly ever sell his pictures, and then for a wretched price. And for that, too, I do not care in the least. It is in his personality that Etheredge seems to me really important. Even fourteen years ago, at thirty, he had an arresting personality. There was something at once quiet and eager about him, as though he were questioning everything without quarrelling with anything, which struck me as rare. But I should not at that time have set him down as a success. He had not yet found himself. He was not yet sufficient to himself. Now, after fourteen years, he is. I know no one else who is so completely rounded a personality, who accepts so simply the external world and is so little troubled by it. He has built around himself a wall not of indifference but of acceptance, against which waves break unavailingly, within which he lives with his whole self, serenely, gently and richly.