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“They all say your work is so brilliant,” she said, soothingly.

“Thunder!” he commented. “I wish they would not say anything kind and pleasant and cheap. At college they praised my verses, and the theatres stole my music for the Pudding play, and the girls giggled over my sketches. And now, at twenty-six, I don’t know whether I want to fiddle, or to write an epic, or to model, or to paint. I am a victim of every artistic impulse.”

“I know what you should do,” she said, wisely, when they had reached a shady spot and were cooling themselves.

“Smoke?” queried Clayton, quizzically.

“You ought to marry!”

“That’s every woman’s great solution, great panacea,” he replied, contemptuously.

“It would steady you and make you work.”

“No,” he replied, thoughtfully, “not unless she were poor, and in that case it would be from the frying-pan into the fire!”

“You should work,” she went on, more courageously. “And a wife would give you inspiration and sympathy.”

“I have had too much of the last already,” he sighed. “And it’s better not to have it all of one sort. After awhile a woman doesn’t produce pleasant or profitable reactions in my soul. Yes, I know,” he added, as he noticed her look of wonderment, “I am selfish and supremely egotistical. Every artist is; his only lookout, however, should be that his surroundings don’t become stale. Or, if you prefer to put it more humanely, an artist isn’t fit to marry; it’s criminal for him to marry and break a woman’s heart.”

After this heroic confession he paused to smoke. “Besides, no woman whom I ever knew really understands art and the ends which the artist is after. She has the temperament, a superficial appreciation and interest, but she hasn’t the stimulus of insight. She’s got the nerves, but not the head.”

“But you just said that you had had too much sympathy and molly-coddling.”

“Did I? Well, I was wrong. I need a lot, and I don’t care how idiotic. It makes me courageous to have even a child approve. I suppose that shows how closely we human animals are linked together. We have got to have the consent of the world, or at any rate a small part of it, to believe ourselves sane. So I need the chorus of patrons, admiring friends, kind women, etc., while I play the Protagonist, to tell me that I am all right, to go ahead. Do you suppose any one woman would be enough? What a great posture for an arm!” His sudden exclamation was called out by the attitude that Miss Marston had unconsciously assumed in the eagerness of her interest. She had thrown her hand over a ledge above them, and was leaning lightly upon it. The loose muslin sleeve had fallen back, revealing a pretty, delicately rounded arm, not to be suspected from her slight figure. Clayton quickly squirmed a little nearer, and touching the arm with an artist’s instinct, brought out still more the fresh white flesh and the delicate veining.

“Don’t move. That would be superb in marble!” Miss Marston blushed painfully.

“How strange you are,” she murmured, as she rose. “You just said that you had given up modelling, or I would let you model my arm in order to give you something to do. You should try to stick to something.”

“Don’t be trite,” laughed Clayton, “and don’t make me consistent. You will keep yourself breathless if you try that!”

“I know what you need,” she said, persistently unmindful of his admonition. “You need the spur. It doesn’t make so much difference what you do–you’re clever enough.”

“‘Truth from the mouths of babes—-‘”

“I am not a babe.” She replied to his mocking, literally. “Even if I am stupid and commonplace, I may have intuitions like other women.”

“Which lead you to think that it’s all chance whether Raphael paints or plays on the piano. Well, I don’t know that you are so absurd. That’s my theory: an artist is a fund of concentrated, undistributed energy that has any number of possible outlets, but selects one. Most of us are artists, but we take so many outlets that the hogshead becomes empty by leaking. Which shall it be? Shall we toss up a penny?”