"They're the only ones who talk about it," he offered as his variation on the dictum. "That's what an artist _is_, isn't he? Somebody who happens to be put together so that it kills him to keep anything to himself. He just goes up in smoke, if he can't run and tell the world what he has seen, or tasted, or handled, or got hit by, and the way it made him feel. I admire and revere artists. They certainly do a lot for the rest of us. But I don't see any reason to think that they feel things any more intensely than anybody else, and I don't see anything so terribly enviable in their lot. There seems to be a lot of hard work about it, if you judge by the way they carry on. I don't see why you can't enjoy beauty and feel tragedy, even if you keep your mouth shut. You can feel it just the same, can't you? I'm sure I've felt things about a million times more intensely than anything that ever got into a book. And I can't say I'm any less satisfied with my fate because I'm not thriftily trying to use those same feelings as raw material for an art." Marise was laughing outrageously by the time he had finished, partly at what he said, partly at Mr. Livingstone's scandalized expression. She was ashamed of the way she laughed over Mr. Crittenden's teasing of poor unconscious Mr. Livingstone. "You don't understand, Crittenden, you don't get my point at all. There's something--something--" Livingstone brought it out with a remnant of the provincial self-consciousness before fine phrases which he so deplored, "there's something god-like, divine, in being an artist, _creating_ something." Mr. Crittenden moved from his negligent pose, tightened up a little. "Oh, if you mean by 'artist' a class broad enough to take in everybody who creates something, yes, of course, they're the only ones who really live. That's what most of us are trying to get a chance to do, trying to create a little order out of chaos. But that's pretty nearly the whole ant-heap of the human race, isn't it? Except the leisure classes." Mr. Livingstone was in despair of making the Philistine understand. "It's something we have so little of in America, it's hard for an American to recognize its existence," he murmured to the company in extenuation of his compatriot's denseness.