Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/52

 few people would guess how unorthodox the author is. As a matter of fact Mr. Hergesheimer is a renegade Presbyterian. He is a Presbyterian turned artist. He is proud of his apostasy and he likes to talk about it. He has shaken off his patrimonial "Puritanism"; he finds life more delectable since; and he delights to find a cool spot in a Havana hotel, and to stretch out his legs and discourse somewhat expansively, for the benefit of his fellow citizens north of the Gulf, upon his "emancipation," with frequent pointed references to his informal dinner-jacket of Chinese silk, the orange blossoms in his buttonhole, the flourished Larrañaga cigar in his fingers, and the frigid mixture of Ron Bacardi, sugar, and vivid green lime at his elbow.

As an artist, he is interested in two things: first in the luxurious, the colorful, the exotic; and second, in the poetry of passionate idealisms, martyr-hot. He himself exhibits a middle-aged prudence and coolness; he possesses a certain amount of taste of a certain kind, which preserves him from a certain kind of now popular grossness; he paints himself as a connoisseur of sensations: these qualities, together with his old-fashioned romantic attachment to "grand passions," give