forces. "The starry night and the majestic rivers
might just as well be plaster-walls," she whispered. "What terrible
occupations are these to make our brothers so dull, bald and
stodgy-looking?"

"It's their art," said Cairns. "They start in merrily enough, but it's
a fight out in the centre of the current. You see them all of one
genial dining-countenance, yet this day they fought each other in the
streets below, and to-morrow again.... It's not only the sweep of the
current, but each other, they have to fight.... Oh, it's very easy for
an artist to look and feel superior, Beth, but we know very well how
much is sordid routine in our own decenter games--and suppose we had
been called to money-making instead. It would catch us young, and we'd
either harden or fail."

... They were taken to a place of stillness and the night-view was
restoring.... Though Cairns had just left Bedient, he had not been told
about the portrait nor the first sitting. Beth wondered if Bedient
foresaw that she would appreciate this. She was getting so that she
could believe anything of the Wanderer. For a long time they talked
about him.... Cairns already was emerging from the miseries of
reaction; new ways of work had opened; he was fired with fresh growth
and delights of service. Beth was charmed with him.... At last she
said:

"Nor has Mr. Bedient missed those rare and subtle things which make
Vina Nettleton the most important woman of my acquaintance."

The sentence was a studied challenge.

"You mean in her work?" he said, under the first spur.

"Did I say _artist_? I meant woman--'most important woman'----"

"That's what you said."

"Yes, I thought so----" Beth shaded the interior light from her eyes to
regard the night through the open window. "It was misty gray all day,
and yet it is clear now as a summer night."

"And so Bedient sees more than a remarkable artist in Vina?" Cairns
mused.

"That much is for the world to see.... Why, those dollar-eating
gentlemen in the big room could see that, if they interested themselves
in her kind of work. But they are not trained to know real women. Their
work keeps them from knowing such things. When they marry a real woman,
it's an accident, largely. A diadem of paste would have caught their
eyes quite as quickly. Sometimes I think they prefer paste jewels....
Only here and there a man of deep discernment reads the truth--and is
held by it. What a fortune is that discernment! A woma