deforest:

[After an argument about the nature of beauty] “Where are you living now?” I asked him.

He looked at me for perhaps a full minute before he replied in a magnificent voice, “On top of Murray’s Roman Gardens!”

He rolled the r’s in the manner later familiar to radio listeners, and his superb eyes examined me to discover whether or not I felt the humor of his burlesquing, and also if I absorbed the complete nonsense of his living in an apartment so entitled. I did.

We reached “Murray’s Roman Gardens,” a lively restaurant of that day, and, when we’d ascended to Jack’s flat above it on the top floor, he asked me to look about the place and observe how it proved that he lived solely for beauty. I said he’d better get to bed, which seemed to hurt his feelings.

“No,” he insisted. “Look at all these beautiful things that I keep about me, every one of them perfect! They’ll help to educate you.”

He pointed to a landscape painting above the mantelpiece. “That, for instance. Give me your unenlightened opinion of it.”

“It’s a daub,” I informed him. “Entirely bad. Go to bed, Jack.”

“Observe the Persian rug upon which you are now standing,” he said. “Have you no grasp of it?”

“None,” I replied. “I think it’s from an Atlantic City auction. You have a matinee tomorrow and what you need is sleep.”

“Observe that other rug, the one before the fireplace,” he commanded. “Have you ever seen a white bear rug to compare with it?”

“It’s sooty,” I told him. “You ought to send it to the cleaner’s.”

Upon that, he seemed to despair of me; but he had a last card to play. On the grand piano stood an artificial plant easily divined to be the gift of some worshipful lady. It was a strange elaborate thing, a rosebush in flower, with leaves, blooming roses, and all exquisitely made of tinted velvet.

“What about that?” he asked, touching it with eloquent fingers. “That reaches you, doesn’t it?”

I laughed disdainfully. “Artificial, Jack. Velvet! Artificial leaves and flowers made of velvet. How painful!”

He became intensely solemn, stood before the velvet plant and made a great slow gesture indicating that he now explained everything deepest within him. “Velvet,” he said. “Exquisitely velvet! Exquisitely artificial! That is the soul of John Barrymore!”

Then, having achieved this climax of effect, he went to his bedroom door, bowed dismissingly, and retired. — Booth Tarkington