the way down until somebody took me--or nobody
took me."

"But why begin at the top?"

"It is easier to bear disappointment going down," she said, seriously;
"if two or three artists had refused me on the first and second floors,
my legs would not have carried me up very far."

"Bad logic," he commented. "We mount by experience, using our wrecked
hopes as footholds."

"You don't know how much a girl can endure. There comes a time-after
years of steady descent--when misfortune and disappointment become
endurable; when hope deferred no longer sickens. It is in rising toward
better things that disappointments hurt most cruelly."

He turned his head in surprise; then went on painting:

"Your philosophy is the philosophy of submission."

"Do you call a struggle of years, submission?"

"But it was giving up after all--acquiescence, despondency, a _laissez
faire_ policy."

"One may tire of fighting."

"One may. Another may not."

"I think you have never had to fight very hard."

He turned his head abruptly; after a moment's silent survey of her, he
resumed his painting with a sharp, impersonal glance before every swift
and decisive brush stroke:

"No; I have never had to fight, Miss West.... It was keen of you to
recognise it. I have never had to fight at all. Things come easily to
me--things have a habit of coming my way.... I suppose I'm not exactly
the man to lecture anybody on the art of fighting fortune. She's always
been decent to me.... Sometimes I'm afraid--I have an instinct that
she's too friendly.... And it troubles me. Do you understand what I
mean?"

"Yes."

He looked up at her: "Are you sure?"

"I think so. I have been watching you painting. I never imagined
anybody could draw so swiftly, so easily--paint so surely, so
accurately--that every brush stroke could be so--so significant, so
decisive.... Is it not unusual? And is not that what is called
facility?"

"Lord in Heaven!" he said; "what kind of a girl am I dealing with?--or
what kind of a girl is dealing so unmercifully with me?"

"I--I didn't mean--"

"Yes, you did. Those very lovely and wonderfully shaped eyes of yours
are not entirely for ornament. Inside that pretty head there's an
apparatus designed for thinking; and it isn't idle."

He laughed gaily, a trifle defiantly:

"You've said it. You've found the fly in the amber. I'm cursed with
facility. Worse still it gives me keenest pleasure to employ it. It does
scare me occ