ait which he had begun
during the previous summer. But the painting of it involved him in
difficulties entirely foreign to him--difficulties born of technical
timidity of the increasing and inexplicable lack of self-confidence. And
deeply worried, he laid it aside, A dull, unreasoning anxiety possessed
him. Those who had given him commissions to execute were commencing to
importune him for results. He had never before disappointed any client.
Valerie could be of very little service to him in the big mural
decorations which, almost in despair, he had abruptly started. Here and
there, in the imposing compositions designed for the Court House, a
female figure, or group of figures, was required, but, in the main, male
figures filled the preliminary cartoons--great law-givers and
law-defenders of all ages and all lands, in robes and gowns of silks; in
armour, in skins, in velvet and ermine--men wearing doublet, jack-coat,
pourpoint; men in turban and caftan, men covered with mail of all
kinds--armour of leather, of fibre, of lacquer, of quilted silk, of
linked steel, Milanaise, iron cuirass; the emblazoned panoply of the
Mongol paladins; Timour Melek's greaves of virgin gold; men of all
nations and of all ages who fashioned or executed human law, from Moses
to Caesar, from Mohammed to Genghis Kahn and the Golden Emperor, from
Charlemagne to Napoleon, and down through those who made and upheld the
laws in the Western world, beginning with Hiawatha, creator of the
Iroquois Confederacy--the Great League.

His studio was a confusion of silks, cut velvets, tapestries,
embroideries, carpets of the East, lay figures glittering with replicas
of priceless armour. Delicate fabrics trailed over chair and floor
almost under foot; inlaid and gem-hilted weapons, illuminated missals,
glass-cased papyri, gilded zones, filets, girdles, robes of fur, hoods,
wallets, helmets, hats, lay piled up, everywhere in methodical disorder.
And into and out of the studio passed male models of all statures, all
ages, venerable, bearded men, men in their prime, men with the
hard-hammered features and thick, sinewy necks of gladiators, men
slender and pallid as dreaming scholars, youths that might have worn the
gold-red elf-locks and the shoulder cloak of Venice, youth chiselled in
a beauty as dark and fierce as David wore when the mailed giant went
crashing earthward under the smooth round pebble from his sling.

Valerie's turn in this splendid panoply wa