Page:The Plutocrat (1927).pdf/49

 of them had omitted it, and with so emphatic a corroboration he looked upon searchingness as pretty much his accepted specialty. "You write, yourself, Mr. Macklyn?" he inquired, a little coldly.

"Macklyn's a poet," Mr. Jones informed him. "I thought you wouldn't know his things. Nobody does. He tries to make people notice him by using no punctuation and omitting capital letters; but it hasn't got him very far. I think I'll leave frames off my pictures and see if somebody won't write a few more articles about them."

"You'd do well whether the articles were written or not," the serious Macklyn said. "Does life frame its pictures? Does nature? Albert speaks flippantly of my method, Mr. Ogle; but he knows well enough why I deliberately use it, though it costs me all but a few readers and even some of them read me only to mock. He paints his pictures with the loose stroke of a Gauguin and the colour of a Picasso, knowing that he, too, can reach but one here, another there, and never the mob; and yet he chaffs me for assuming the same privilege. I write poems that have no rhymes, no metre and no punctuation because I am expressing my searchings in that way."

Searchings'?" Ogle said. "There might be