"I have never had the honor of meeting your friend, Monsieur Saxon,"
declared the instructor in English. "But his reputation has crossed
the sea! I have had the pleasure of seeing several of his canvases.
There is none of us following in the footsteps of Marston who would
not feel his life crowned with high success, had he come as close as
Saxon to grasping the secret that made Marston Marston. Your great
country should be proud of him."

Steele smiled.

"Our country could also claim Marston. You forget that, monsieur."

The instructor spread his hands in a deprecating gesture.

"Ah, _mon ami_, that is debatable. True, your country gave him birth,
but it was France that gave him his art."

"Did you know," suggested Steele, "that some of the unsigned Saxon
pictures have passed competent critics as the work of Marston?"

Hautecoeur lifted his heavy brows.

"Impossible, monsieur," he protested; "quite impossible! It is the
master's boast that any man who can pass a painting as a Marston
has his invitation to do so. He never signs a canvas--it is
unnecessary--his stroke--his treatment--these are sufficient
signature. I do not belittle the art of your friend," he hastened to
explain, "but there is a certain--what shall I say?--a certain
individualism about the work of this greatest of moderns which is
inimitable. One must indeed be much the novice to be misled. Yet, I
grant you there was one quality the master himself did not formerly
possess which the American grasped from the beginning."

"His virility of touch?" inquired Steele.

"Just so! Your man's art is broader, perhaps stronger. That difference
is not merely one of feeling: it is more. The American's style was the
outgrowth of the bigness of your vast spaces--of the broad spirit of
your great country--of the pride that comes to a man in the
consciousness of physical power and currents of red blood! Marston was
the creature of a confined life, bounded by walls. He was
self-absorbed, morbid, anemic. To be the perfect artist, he needed
only to be the perfect animal! He did not understand that. He disliked
physical effort. He felt that something eluded him, and he fought for
it with brush and mahlstick. He should have used the Alpinstock or the
snow-shoe." Hautecoeur was talking with an enthused fervor that swept
him into metaphor.

"Yet--" Steele was secretly sounding his way toward the end he
sought--"yet, the latter pictures of Marston have that same qual