If it is true that our lives are increasingly frustrate and commonplace and standardized because we do not take[Pg 299] time and trouble to think out what is the worthwhile life and achieve a scale of values is it not because we lack the courage to be different from the Joneses and to give to our lives that precise quality of uniqueness which is characteristic of the products of art? The three qualities, therefore, which would seem to be essential to any artistic ordering of our lives are courage, thought and will. We have got to acquire that rarest form of courage in America, the courage to be considered different from our neighbors and the rest of our set. If Mrs. Jones’s greatest joys in life are the perfectly appointed dinners she delights in being known to give, and riding in her Rolls-Royce, then let her have them if she can afford them. But if your greatest joys are simple hospitality and the good talk around the board, and if you care far more for books than the sort of car that affords you transportation, then in the name of Art give simple dinners, line your shelves with books and drive a Ford. If you love Elizabethan drama and detest the current fiction, read your drama; and when someone asks you if you have read The Mauve Petticoat, tell him candidly that you have not and that you do not intend to. If you are intelligent enough to be bored stiff with the absurd social life of ninety-nine clubs in a hundred, refuse to join the things and amuse yourself in your own way.