"I'll say it's the first one he laughed at," said Mr. Elliott, pensively.
"He didn't laugh at any of the others. Look, he's still looking at it.
That's longer than he looked at any of the others."
"All right, Louis," from Mike. "Come on."
"Ho, ho," Louis went on, "I'd like to see this guy Elliott. Anybody who would draw a picture like that. Hold your horses, Mike, here's another. 'The Faun." What's a faun, Mike? I guess he means fern. It looks like a fern."
"It does that, Louis. But we'll have to let it go as a faun. It's probably a foreign word. Most of these artists are foreigners, anyway."
Mr. Elliott and I left, Mr. Elliott remarking on the way down the
Institute steps, "Ho, hum."
ORNAMENTS
Ornaments change, and perhaps not for the best. The scherzo architecture of Villon's Paris, the gabled caprice of Shakespeare's London, the Rip Van Winkle jauntiness of a vanished New York, these are ghosts that wander among the skyscrapers and dynamo beltings of modernity.
One by one the charming blunders of the past have been set to rights. Highways are no longer the casual folderols of adventure, but the reposeful and efficient arteries of traffic. The roofs of the town are no longer a rumble of idiotic hats cocked at a devil-may-care angle. Windows no longer wink lopsidedly at one another. Doorways and chimneys, railings and lanterns have changed. Cobblestones and dirt have vanished, at least officially.
Towns once were like improvised little melodramas. Men once wore their backgrounds as they wore their clothes—to fit their moods. A cap and feather, a gable and a latticed window for romance. A glove and rapier, a turret and a postern gate for adventure. And for our immemorial friend Routine a humpty-dumpty jumble of alleys, feather pens, cobblestones, echoing stairways and bouncing milk carts.
* * * * *