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 new books and golden gowns and cut flowers. I remember once remarking to them, after they had taken me into one of their theatre parties in the grand style: "Art for the upper classes; morality for men of moderate incomes; religion for the poor." "No"; retorted Oliver, with his instantaneous eye for the weak spot in my armor: "Art for the cities; morality for the towns; religion for the villages."

We provincials are, it is true, fairly well disciplined to the stoic "apathy"—a kind of cultivated hardening of the heart towards everything beyond the reach of our hands and the range of our eyes. Through month after month the rosy knuckles of temptation may knock on our hardened hearts in vain. But recent investigation proves that under constant percussion and strain the hardest substances yield: steel girders buckle, flywheels burst, and bridges wear out and give way to a malady known to science as "the fatigue of metals." An analogous malady, attacking even the most firmly tempered of hearts, accounts for the popularity of Charles Lamb's "moral holiday," that excursion from the moral macadam which nowadays we call a detour. It explains, too, in my own case, the sharp nostalgia for the city which afflicts me