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not merely Charles' helpmeet, but his collaborator and inspiration; I hesitate to use the word Muse, although that, too, is probably correct. Charles once wrote in a letter to Margaret, "Remember, you are half if not three-quarters in all my architectural work…" Reportedly, he said also, "Margaret has genius, I have only talent." Genius, waylaid by all sorts of impulses, is often unruly, harder to marshal into achievement than talent, the latter less laissez-faire in the matter of rules. In any case, as art historian David Brett describes in his brilliantly incisive work, C.R. Mackintosh: The Poetics of Workmanship, the famous all-white interiors of Mackintosh, especially that in his own house, are "feminine," expressing an intense privacy, a barely sublimated eroticism. I remember once, the literary critic Edward Said, my professor in a seminar on Proust at Columbia, saying words to the effect, "When you are in love with someone, you want to shut yourself up in a room with them." The white rooms created by Charles Rennie Mackintosh evoke and enclose this hermetic world of two; we sense Margaret at their heart. Margaret's 1902 composition, The Heart of the Rose, links this organ, held to be the seat of our emotions, to the rose, its color and manifold surfaces, inner and outer. We know, from contemporary scholarship, including Brett's, that Mackintosh's small coterie at the Glasgow School of Art, known as 'The Four' which comprised Margaret, her sister Frances and the latter's husband, Herbert MacNair, was deeply influenced by the European Symbolist movement, catalyzed, in turn by Theosophy and Rosicrucianism. The Theosophist leader, Madame Blavatsky, wrote, "To the Rosicrucian, the 'Rose' was the HYLAND