_Mais ça_, are you a plain imbecile? That is a game for children. Why do you not do as so many of your good writers do? Your Edgar Lee Masters, your Winesburg, Ohio. Have you not seen the photographs of men and women on your walls? They are a type, as distinct as a Frenchman or a German. Study these men, know their lives. You have a real work to do, you have the talent, the opportunity even. This is your work in life. You Americans, you are wasteful, mad-- Our background. You would paint the wind. Well, it has been tried--many times, and do you know where that leads? I know where it has led. But do you know? Have you seen, felt, heard what they have seen, felt, heard, our Villons-- Apollo was out of breath but the nymph was more tired than he. The chase must soon have ended when she falling to her knees half from the will to be there half from fatigue besought her mistress Diana to save her from the God's desire. And she was changed into a laurel bush. All about the hills where they stood the hard waxen leaves of the laurel glistened above the dead leaves of the hardwood trees, the beech, the maple, the oak. You imagine I am French because I attack you from the continental viewpoint. You are wrong. I am from the country of your friends Mussorgsky, Dostoevsky, Chekov. At least if you will not yield me the point that America cannot be new, cannot do anything unless she takes the great heritage which men of all nations and ages have left to the human race. You mean that I should not be an American but--Turgenev, enjoy you more if, well, if you were more comprehensible, a little more particular, _vous comprenez_? You sweep out your arms, you--I see no faces, no details of the life, no new shape-- The druggist's boy cannot be distinguished from his master when he says, Hello, over the phone--Is that what you mean? Well, you are very much children, you Americans. It is not to be avoided as far as I can see. Let us have now a beginning of composition. We have had enough of your improvisations. I am consumed by my lusts. No American can imagine the hunger I have. It is the itch, monsieur. It is neurasthenia. Desire is not a thing to speak of as if it were a matter of filling the stomach. It is wind, gas. You are empty my friend. Eat. Then and then only. Like all men save perhaps the Chinese you are most transparent when you imagine yourself most protected. Her bosom reached almost to her knees. That morning in the October garden she had picked a violet for him and placed it in his coat. Watching the feet of men and women as they touched the pavement a strong odor of violets crossed his path. He turned and saw the massive Jewess waddling by. It had been good perfume too.