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up Fifth Avenue at five o'clock in the afternoon. It was lovely. You bought books at Brentano's on the corner of Madison Square and Fifth Avenue. It was lovely. Brentano's had moved way up town to Madison Square when I knew it, although I had been in the shop on visits to New York when it was on Union Square. I don't know how we all met, but people interested in music, painting, sculpture, literary efforts of one kind or another, publishing, even in the academic life were not isolated in apartments and pockets. They knew each other and they mingled. The annual Varnishing Day of the Academy of Fine Arts was a case in point. It wasn't just artists who mixed up in this. It was the general public - the educated public.

Varnishing Day is the name that was always used on the opening day of a show. In those days before pictures were shown they were varnished - really varnished - to preserve their colors and prevent them from being harmed. The idea of not varnishing is quite a recent idea - you spoil the freshness of the color that way. All the old masters that you see have been ruined by being varnished, re-varnished and re-varnished. Today one of the great techniques of the custodianship of paintings is to remove the varnish. Then you see the beautiful colors come out. Even under a Rembrandt there is color. He's been varnished so much that people don't know that he knew that there were any colors on his palette. Take