As we worked the Master talked ... talked with me as if he had known me for years—as if I, too, were Somebody.
There was nothing he did not discuss, in memorable phrase and trenchant, clever epigram. For he saw that I believed in him, worshipped whole-heartedly at his shrine of genius, and he gave me, in return, of his best. For the first time I saw what human language is for. I thought of Goethe at Weimar ... Wilde's clever conversation in London....
Never since did I see the real man, Spalton, as I saw him then, the man he might always have been, if he had had an old-world environment, instead of the environment of modern, commercial America—the spirit of which finally claimed him, as he grew more successful....
Modern, commercial America—where we proudly make a boast of lack of culture, and where artistic and aesthetic feeling, if freely expressed, makes one's hearers more likely than not, at once uneasy and restive.
That night, at supper, I caught my first glimpse of the Eoites in a body. The contrast between them and my school-folk was agreeably different. I found among them an atmosphere of good-natured greeting and raillery, that sped from table to table. And when Spalton strode in, with his bold, swinging gait (it seemed that he had just returned from a lecture in a distant city early that afternoon), there was cheering and clapping.
Guests and workers joined together in the same dining hall, with no distinctive division.... I sat next to Spalton's table, and a warm glow of pleasure swept through me when he sent me a pleasant nod.
"Hello, Razorre," he had greeted me; then he had turned to the group at his table and told them about me, I could see by their glances—but in a pleasant way.
The next morning I was at work in the bindery, smearing glue on the backs of unbound books. My wage was three dollars a week and "found," as they say in the West. Not much, but what did it matter? There was a fine library of the world's classics, including all the liberal and revolutionary books that I had heard about, but which I could never obtain at the libraries ... and there were, as associates and companions, many people, who, if extremely eccentric, were, nevertheless, alive and alert and interested in all the beautiful things Genius has created in Art and Song....