I am sick of their kinsmen, of the surgical tongues who dissect, who vivisect and auto-sect. I am sick most of all of my own talk. But I continue to talk. I talk out of boredom and manage only to increase it. I talk out of vanity and spread disillusionment. I talk out of love and have to apologize. A victim of habit, I continue speaking, although I know the spoken word is the true medium of misunderstanding. Words, words, they keep tumbling out of my mouth and blowing away like dust before the wind. A pock on them. There have been revolutions in literature, authors have changed the size and construction of the novel, publishers have changed the color of their bindings, poets have changed the form of their poetry and the essence of its style, thinkers even have altered slightly the trend of their thought. Music, painting, decorating, carving—everything changes with time except talk, which only increases. What a staggering illustration of the theory that it is only the weak things which survive. For talk is the commonest of weaknesses. Blaa, blaa, blaa—why not a revolution? What ails the radicals? Do they not realize that the time is ripe? They have changed the moral forms, the literary forms, why not the spoken forms? Why not a substitution of expressive grunts and whoops and growls and chuckles and groans and gurgles and whees and wows? Or is this matter one not for the radical but for “The Scavenger.” The Nine!—Exhibit! Sometime in the winter a rumor got about that nine artists of Chicago were to form themselves into a group and hold an independent exhibition. At once the other artists were divided into two factions, those who jeered and those who applauded, those who said unpleasant things and those who had the enduring hope that at last something better was to be done in our exhibitions. The Great Nine, as the group began to be called—whether by themselves or by others, it matters not: the phrase is a handicap—consists of Frederic C. Bartlett, William Penhallow Henderson, Lawton Parker, Karl Albert Buehr, Louis Betts, Charles Francis Browne, Ralph Clarkson, Wilson Irvine, and Oliver Dennett Grover. They were too generous in their number. Five, and there would have been no comment; nine, and there was aroused indignation, criticism, and a “show us” spirit which should have put the Nine on their mettle and made them give a stunning and silencing show. On May thirteenth, after one postponement when expectation was tense, the exhibition opened. What had we? A new setting and old stuff!