rful thing! It is to a man what clouds and mists are to a
land! Without them, there is only arid desert--with too many, there
are storm and endless rain and dreary winds. He had the storms and
rain and winds in his life--but over all he had the genius! The
masters knew that before they had criticized him six months. In a
year, they stood abashed before him."

"Go on, please!" prompted Duska, in a soft voice of sympathetic
interest.

"He dreaded notoriety, he feared fame. He never had a photograph
taken, and, when it was his turn to pose in the sketch classes, where
the students alternate as models for their fellows, his nervousness
was actual suffering. To be looked at meant, for him, to drop his eyes
and find his hands in his way--the hands that could paint the finest
pictures in Europe!"

"To understand his half-mad conduct, one must understand his half-mad
genius. To most men who can command fame, the plaudits of clapping
hands are as the incense of triumph. To him, there was but the art
itself--the praise meant only embarrassment. His ideal was that of the
English poet--a land where

'--only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall
blame:
And no one shall work for money and no one shall work for fame.'

That was what he wished, and could not have in Paris.

"It was in painting only that he forgot himself, and became a
disembodied magic behind a brush. When a picture called down unusual
comment from critics and press, he would disappear--remain out of
sight for months. No one knew where he went. Once, I remember, in my
time, he stayed away almost a year.

"He knew one woman in Paris, besides the models, who were to him
impersonal things. Of that one woman alone, he was not afraid. She was
a pathetic sort of a girl. Her large eyes followed him with adoring
hero-worship. She was the daughter of an English painter who could not
paint, one Alfred St. John, who lodged in the rear of the floor above.
She herself was a poet who could not write verse. To her, he talked
without bashfulness, and for her he felt vast sorrow. Love! _Mon
dieu_, no! If he had loved her, he would have fled from her in terror!

"But she loved him. Then, he fell ill. Typhoid it was, and for weeks
he was in his bed, with the papers crying out each day what a disaster
threatened France and the world, if he should die. And she nursed him,
denying herself rest. Typhoid may be helped by a physician, but the
pati