"A nettle leaf is small. But that's not the reason why it won't ever grow into an oak. Look here! A sheaf of winter grasses, rightly arranged in clear glass, has as much of the essence of beauty as a bronze vase of the Ming dynasty. I ask you just one question, How many people do you know who are capable of—"
The art-critic broke in: "Oh come! You're setting up an impossibly high standard of aesthetic feeling."
"I'm not presuming to do any such thing as setting up a standard! I'm just insisting that people who can't extract joy from the shadow pattern of a leafy branch on a gray wall, are liars if they claim to enjoy a fine Japanese print. What they enjoy in the print is the sense that they've paid a lot for it. In my opinion, there's no use trying to advance a step towards any sound aesthetic feeling till some step is taken away from the idea of cost as the criterion of value about anything." He drew a long breath and went on, rather more rapidly than was his usual habit of speech: "I've a real conviction on that point. It's come to me of late years that one reason we haven't any national art is because we have too much magnificence. All our capacity for admiration is used up on the splendor of palace-like railway stations and hotels. Our national tympanum is so deafened by that blare of sumptuousness that we have no ears for the still, small voice of beauty. And perhaps," he paused, looking down absently at a crumb he rolled between his thumb and finger on the table, "it's possible that the time is ripening for a wider appreciation of another kind of beauty … that has little to do even with such miracles as the shadow of a branch on a wall."
Morrison showed no interest in this vaguely phrased hypothesis, and returned to an earlier contention: "You underestimate," he said, "the amount of education and taste and time it takes to arrange that simple-looking vase of grasses, to appreciate your leaf-shadows."
"All I'm saying is that your campaign of aesthetic education hasn't made the matter vital enough to people, to any people, not even to people who call themselves vastly aesthetic, so that they give time and effort and self-schooling to the acquisition of beauty. They not only want their money to do their dirty work for them, they try to make it do their fine living for them too, with a minimum of effort on their part. They want to buy beauty, outright, with cash, and have it stay put, where they can get their fingers on it at any time, without bothering about it in the meantime. That's the way a Turk likes his women—same impulse exactly,"
"I've known a few Caucasians too …," Mrs. Marshall-Smith contributed a barbed point of malice to the talk.
Page laughed, appreciating her hit. "Oh, I mean Turk as a generic term." Sylvia, circling warily about the contestants, looking for a chance to make her presence felt, without impairing the masculine gusto with which they were monopolizing the center of the stage, tossed in a suggestion, "Was it Hawthorne's—it's a queer fancy like Hawthorne's—the idea of the miser, don't you remember, whose joy was to roll naked in his gold pieces?"
Page snatched up with a delighted laugh the metaphor she had laid in his hand. "Capital! Precisely! There's the thing in a nutshell. We twentieth century Midases have got beyond the simple taste of that founder of the family for the shining yellow qualities of money, but we love to wallow in it none the less. We like to put our feet on it, in the shape of rugs valued according to their cost, we like to eat it in insipid, out-of-season fruit and vegetables."
"Doesn't it occur to you," broke in Morrison, "that you may be attacking something that's a mere phase, an incident of transition?"
"Is anything ever anything else!" Page broke in to say.