He lifted his head and looked at Kovarsky a second in a curiously appraising way as if he were trying to fit together the rather stout blond boy sitting there and the work he had just read, as if perhaps he were reminding himself to be gentle, or reminding himself that Kovarsky, the person, must be seen all round, whole, his precocious background in the New York public schools, his passionate reading of the Marxist critics weighed in the balance.

They all wished devoutly that he would say something, anything now.

“I don’t know what to say, Kovarsky,” he began, looking down at his clasped hands. “You’ve put the cart before the horse, you see, and so perhaps put the wrong cart before your horse. You have in fact judged before you have had the experience; you have committed the—to my mind—unpardonable sin of applying a preconceived formula to something which you only looked at through this formula, not for itself. You have got to judge a work of art first for what it is; you’ve got to possess it completely. But how thin your appreciation is, how poverty-stricken because you wore blinders all the time——”

“But, sir”—Kovarsky was red with shyness and perhaps anger—“I did read all the books. I do admire Willa Cather. Surely I said so.”

“Perhaps so. But it’s a grudging we-must-be-fair-after-all kind of admiration, a thin admiration. Why? Because you had made up your mind before you opened one of the novels that your criterion would be Lewis, Dreiser, maybe—Sherwood Anderson——”

“What’s wrong with having a criterion?” someone else asked.