troubled when he broke the quiet, and
everybody turned toward him:

"Then," he said, slowly, "what _is_ the matter with Neville?"

Somebody said: "He _does_ convince you; it isn't that, is it?"

A voice replied: "Does he convince himself?"

"There is--there always has been something lacking in all that big,
glorious, splendid work. It only needs that one thing--whatever it is,"
said Ogilvy, quietly. "Kelly is too sure, too powerfully perfect, too
omniscient--"

"And we mortals can't stand that," commented Annan, laughing. "'Raus mit
Neville!' He paints joy and sorrow as though he'd never known either--"

And his voice checked itself of its own instinct in the startled
silence.

"That man, Neville, has never known the pain of work," said Gail,
deliberately. "When he has passed through it and it has made his hand
less steady, less omnipotent--"

"That's right. We can't love a man who has never endured what we have,"
said another. "No genius can hide his own immunity. That man paints with
an unscarred soul. A little hell for his--and no living painter could
stand beside him."

"Piffle," observed John Burleson.

Ogilvy said: "It is true, I think, that out of human suffering a quality
is distilled which affects everything one does. Those who have known
sorrow can best depict it--not perhaps most plausibly, but most
convincingly--and with fewer accessories, more reticence, and--better
taste."

"Why do you want to paint tragedies?" demanded Burleson.

"One need not paint them, John, but one needs to understand them to
paint anything else--needs to have lived them, perhaps, to become a
master of pictured happiness, physical or spiritual."

"That's piffle, too!" said Burleson in his rumbling bass--"like that
damn hen you lugged in--"

A shout of laughter relieved everybody.

"Do you want a fellow to go and poke his head into trouble and get
himself mixed up in a tragedy so that he can paint better?" insisted
Burleson, scornfully.

"There's usually no necessity to hunt trouble," said Annan.

"But you say that Kelly never had any and that he'd paint better if he
had."

"Trouble _might_ be the making of Kelly Neville," mused Ogilvy, "and it
might not. It depends, John, not on the amount and quality of the hell,
but on the man who's frying on the gridiron."

Annan said: "Personally I don't see how Kelly _could_ paint happiness or
sorrow or wonder or fear into any of his creations any more convincingly
than