MEN I HAVE PAINTED
spanking trot through the hedge-grown lanes and over the turnpike roads which, in those days, were free from the motor that has made the elegant and exhilarating pastime of driving high-strung and restive horses almost obsolete.
Judge Porter's traditional love of horses has been inherited by his daughter, who, like Margot, can ride straight to hounds.
There are two subjects on which Judge Porter dissents from me, Art and Finance, and no amount of threshing out by both of us will ever separate the wheat from the chaff. He will admit that wheat is for use and flowers for beauty, but not that the latter is as important in the economy of things as the former; from my point of view more important, because they stand for æsthetics and ethics, the same sentiments being innate in both; whereas wheat, a mere accident in life, or the result of a misfortune in Eden, is the remnant of a rudimentary state of man, and does not go to the root of civilization as flowers do.
At our first, or one of our first, interviews he was led by some remark of mine to say, "Oh! Art is only an accident in life." It was said with a judicial manner, as he was poring over a brief, and with a tone of finality.
With ars longa vita brevis in mind, I said, "I should like to argue that point with you. To me Art seems the only normal thing, whereas law and medicine are merely the results of the accidents of life." The Judge was taken aback at this attack upon the professions, and, plunging deeper into his papers, muttered, "Impossible; but I am too busy to argue it now." That subject has been a closed book between us ever since. A man of his acumen could not fail to see that I was right, for a broken heart, a broken leg, or a lost cause brought law or surgery
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