Ainslee's Magazine, February 1913 — page 94: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

i. pase it AAS TT MUTT PLEQUI4 NAb FRCMdULLCH) ELLALILIST EG TAPPPREHA TALI LENT WMA beedY Pg cP Pca PRL OI TET TG BUR IHARUTMH LOWE) TACOA atin et Htl—A MATTER OF STANDARD Look at the woman here with the new soul, Fresh upon her lips Alit, the visionary butterfly Waiting my word to enter to make bright, Or flutter off and leave all blank as first—Pippa Passes. 2ERY few beautiful things came into Olaf Nilsson’s life—very few beautiful real things, that is. His violin gave to him many lovely illusions born of the delicate tones that a great German master had taught him how to produce. And the poet’s soul, unquenchable within him, showed him other fair things—a glimpse of sunset red over the gray and smoke-wreathed roof tops on which his window looked; a spray of fresh green in the square just a block or two beyond; sometimes a flight of birds; on hot nights the cooling splen- dor of the moon. Oh, yes—these sweet, chary beauties of the city were his; to no man were they more free. But extraneous beauty, beauty that other people called beauty—the graces of life, the charms of women, the color and magic of things—these stayed afar from Olaf Nilsson like the Blue Bird of Happiness. He was of the fiber of which artists are made—artists in life, as well as in art. Under different conditions he could have appreciated the poetry of perfect food, and the harmony of rich surroundings. As things were, he rarely had enough to eat, and he lived in one of the cheapest upper rooms -of Mrs. Levinsky’s cheap lodging house. Fate is curiously wasteful in this fash- ion—or is it willful wantonness? Does she, indeed, find a malicious content in gathering walnuts for the toothless, and feeding dyspeptics with cakes and ale? The cheap attic room would have done quite well enough for Mr. Goldrocks, who was losing his eyesight, and had a fad against a temperature above fifty. And Olaf Nilsson could have got drunk on Mr. Goldrocks’ Gobelin tapestries and the sweet, languorous breath from his conservatories. So much for Fate, the only lady with a sense of humor, and a bitter humor at that! In a mood even more freakish and more intention- ally heartless than usual, she brought Pippa Carpenter into Olaf Nilsson’s gray life—a life in which the only color came from the paint box of dreams. Mrs. Carpenter was a woman whom no man could describe ten minutes after he had met her. He would have no idea whether she was short or tall; he would not know how old she was; he could not tell the color of her eyes. The masculine being did not live who could note definitely the way she did her hair, or the kind of clothes she wore. But COMMIC OOO; KS»AC©