Another man now made his appearance--an artist. I shall not forget him soon, for you do not often meet people who have the courage to appear at Sunday afternoons in a shabby, workaday business suit, unpolished shoes, a green neckerchief in lieu of collar and tie, and cuffless sleeves. I admired the quality, the workmanship, of the silver-set scarab which held his green linen neckerchief together, but I was a little puzzled as to whether he was very poor and his presence insisted upon, or comfortably progressive and indifferent to conventional dress. His face and body were quite thin; his hands delicate. He had an apprehensive eye that rarely met one’s direct gaze. “Do you think art really needs that?” Miss N. asked me. She was referring to the green linen neckerchief. “I admire the courage. It is at least individual.” “It is after George Bernard Shaw. It has been done before,” replied Miss N. “Then it requires almost more courage,” I replied. Here Mrs. W. moved the sad excerpt from the morgue to the center of the room that he of the green neckerchief might gaze at it. “I like it,” he pronounced. “The note is somber, but it is excellent work.” [Illustration: Drawn by W. J. Glackens “HOPED FOR THE DAY WHEN THE ISSUE MIGHT BE TRIED OUT PHYSICALLY”] Then he took his departure with interesting abruptness. Almost immediately the Lady B. was extending her hand in an almost pathetic farewell. Her voice was lofty, sad, sustained. I wish I could describe it. There was just a suggestion of _Lady Macbeth_ in the sleep-walking scene. As she made her slow, graceful exit, I wanted to applaud loudly. Mrs. W. turned to me as the nearest source of interest, and I realized with horror that she was going to fling her Picasso at my head again, and with as much haste as was decent I, too, took my leave. Another evening I went with an American friend to call on two professional critics, one working in the field of literature, the other in art exclusively. I mention these two men and their labors because they were very interesting to me, representing, as they did, two fields of artistic livelihood in London, and both making moderate incomes, not large, but sufficient to live on in a simple way. They were men of mettle, as I discovered, urgent, thinking types of mind, quarreling to a certain extent with life and fate, and doing their best to read this very curious riddle of existence. These two men lived in charming, though small, quarters not far from fashionable London, on the fringe of ultra-respectability, if not of it. Mr. F. was a conservative man, thirty-two or thirty-three years of age, pale, slender, remote, artistic. Mr. Lewis was in character not unlike Mr. F., I should have said, though he was the older man, artistic, remote, ostensibly cultivated, living and doing all the refined things on principle more than anything else.