is knees. "Genius, _I_
believe, is a disease of the nerves; and I don't mind telling you that I
consider poets and musicians quite crazy."

Arved's eyes were blazing blue signals.

"But, my dear Quell, are not all men mad at some time or another? Madly
in love, religiously mad, patriotically insane, and idiotic on the
subject of clothes, blood, social precedence, handsome persons, money?
And is it not a sign of insanity when one man claims sanity for his own
particular art? Painting, I admit, is--"

"What the devil do you know about painting?" Quell roughly interposed;
"you are a poet and, pretending to love all creation,--altruism, I think
your sentimental philosophers call it,--have the conceit to believe you
bear a star in your stomach when it is only a craving for rum. I've
been through the game."

He began to pace the sward, chewing a blade of grass. He spoke in
hurried, staccato phrases:--

"Why was I put away? Listen: I tried to paint the sun,--for I hate your
moon and its misty madness. To put this glorious furnace on canvas is,
as you will acknowledge, the task of a god. It never came to me in my
dreams, so I wooed it by day. Above all, I wished to express truth; the
sun is black. Think of an ebon sun fringed with its dazzling
photosphere! I tried to paint sun-rhythms, the rhythms of the quivering
sky, which is never still even when it seems most immobile; I tried to
paint the rhythms of the atmosphere, shivering as it is with chords of
sunlight and chromatic scales as yet unpainted. Like Oswald Alving in
Ibsen's Ghosts, my last cry will be for 'the sun.' How did my friends
act? What did the critics say? A black sun was too much for the world,
though astronomers have proven my theory correct. The doctors swore I
drank too much absinthe; the critics said a species of optical madness
had set in; that I saw only the peripheral tints--I was yellow and blue
crazy. Perhaps I was, perhaps I am. So is the fellow crazy who invented
wireless telegraphy; so is the man off his base who invents a folding
bird cage. We are all crazy, and the craziest gang are our doctors at
the Hermitage." He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. Arved rolled his
handsome head acquiescingly.

"You poets and musicians are trying to compass the inane. You are trying
to duplicate your dreams, dreams without a hint of the sun. The painter
at least copies or interprets real life; while the composer dips his
finger in the air, making endless