capable of a false note in personal relations as Paderewski is incapable of striking the wrong note at the piano. Do they never feel headache, melancholy, exasperation, fatigue, wrath? They are human: I am sure they do. But they are finished and highly conscientious performers in the art of life; and one never catches them out. Their "pose" seems effortless now. It seems to spring from a vital principle of their being. Whatever they do, whatever they say, gives delight, because the welter of their subconventional instincts and emotions finds no outlet except through beautiful forms.
When I think of these charming persons, I wish to write an essay in defense of "posing." It is very clear, in the light furnished by the psychoanalysts and the naturalistic novelists—it is very clear that whenever we have been decently agreeable to one another for an hour at a time we have been posing—we have been acting a part, and we are a little fatigued when it is over. There is work in it. There is real work done when a lady accepts with effusive joy an invitation to a dinner, which she tells her husband five minutes later that she would "rather die than attend."
Nature does so little for us. Nature does not even teach us how to walk or to speak or to eat in a fashion which is not repulsive to civilized society. Military training and the dancing master and the singing teacher and the mater familias have to stand over us with a stick for the first eighteen years of our lives to take the natural curvature out
