Anyhow one is not supposed to take LOVE seriously, in these books. Eve Effingham, impaled on the social pin, conscious all the time of her own ego and of nothing else, suddenly fluttering in throes of love: no, it makes me sick. Love is never LOVE until it has a pin pushed through it and becomes an IDEAL. The ego turning on a pin is wildly IN LOVE, always. Because that's the thing to be. Cooper was a GENTLEMAN, in the worst sense of the word. In the Nineteenth Century sense of the word. A correct, clock-work man. Not altogether, of course. The great National Grouch was grinding inside him. Probably he called it COSMIC URGE. Americans usually do: in capital letters. Best stick to National Grouch. The great American grouch. Cooper had it, gentleman as he was. That is why he flitted round Europe so uneasily. Of course in Europe he could be, and was, a gentleman to his heart's content. "In short," he says in one of his letters, "we were at table two counts, one monsignore, an English Lord, an Ambassador, and my humble self." Were we really! How nice it must have been to know that one self, at least, was humble. And he felt the democratic American tomahawk wheeling over his uncomfortable scalp all the time. The great American grouch. Two monsters loomed on Cooper's horizon. MRS. COOPER MY WORK MY WORK MY WIFE MY WIFE MY WORK THE DEAR CHILDREN MY WORK!!! There you have the essential keyboard of Cooper's soul. If there is one thing that annoys me more than a business man and his BUSINESS, it is an artist, a writer, painter, musician, and MY WORK. When an artist says MY WORK, the flesh goes tired on my bones. When he says MY WIFE, I want to hit him. Cooper grizzled about his work. Oh, heaven, he cared so much whether it was good or bad, and what the French thought, and what Mr. Snippy Knowall said, and how Mrs. Cooper took it. The pin, the pin! But he was truly an artist: then an American: then a gentleman. And the grouch grouched inside him, through all. They seemed to have been specially fertile in imagining themselves "under the wigwam," do these Americans, just when their knees were comfortably under the mahogany, in Paris, along with the knees of 4 Counts 2 Cardinals 1 Milord 5 Cocottes 1 Humble self. You bet, though, that when the cocottes were being raffled off, Fenimore went home to his _Wish Fulfilment_ _Actuality_ THE WIGWAM _vs._ MY HOTEL CHINGACHGOOK _vs._ MY WIFE NATTY BUMPPO _vs._ MY HUMBLE SELF Fenimore lying in his Louis Quatorze hôtel in Paris, passionately musing about Natty Bumppo and the pathless forest, and mixing his imagination with the Cupids and Butterflies on the painted ceiling, while Mrs. Cooper was struggling with her latest gown in the next room, and déjeuner was with the Countess at eleven.... Men live by lies.