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Beatrice Wood       4

Arensbergs encouraged me often to call. I did.

Meeting the Arensbergs changed my life. At their home I met writers, poets, painters, and heard art discussed from liberal points of view. They made up for my disappointment of two years back of not working with Gordon Craig. The disappointment of me teens was that studying in Patts, I planned to find a new liberal world of culture by going to Florence to be near Gordon Craig. Gordon Craig was the illegitimate son of Ellen Terry, and the innovator of new approaches to stage design. My mother had corresponded with Mrs. Craig, and everything was in order for me to spend winter in Italy with him, my mother returning to America. Two days before the eventful dat my mother walked into my room, white and ominous, "Did you know Gordon Craig was an immoral man?" she accused, face green with schock.

 "Yes." At that early age I knew most men were immoral, having read the Russians as well as the French. Besides accepting that someday I would be seduced, what could be better than have it accomplished by Craig, a man of wit and talent, rather than by some dullard. But of course, I did not tell this possibility to my mother. At her decision my world crashed in dispair, I thought culture was lost forever.

The Arensberg brought me into the kind of life I hoped to find with Gordon Craig, and from that time on I saw them two or three times a week. I was acting at the time, and when the performance was over, I would rush to the Arensbergs and visit until one or two in the morning. Drinks were served throughout the evening and At midnight huge platters of chocolate eclairs appeared, for those, like Lou and myself, who did not drink but enjoyed sweet things.