uggles of the powers within to assert and
express themselves. It had so happened that I had never seen her at
work before. It was only recently that she had been allowed to give up
set studies for her own creative fancy. For years she had been employed
in acquiring the technique of her art; and even beside these
considerations, I had not been with her in her moments of most tense
application, and I should not have been with her now but that I was
needed as a tool in the work. And as I saw her at this moment, filled
with mental energy and dominated by the pleasure of mental labour, a
quick sympathetic elation came over me, almost immediately after to be
replaced by simple fear.

"I am afraid you have overtaxed yourself rather," I said, in
conventional phrase; "I'm afraid you're in pain."

"Oh, that's nothing! Come and tell me what you think!" she said,
extending her hand, but not taking her eyes from the drawing. "This is
only the first study, of course. But tell me, have I got a
sufficiently--well--expectant--rapt expression? I am not quite sure."

I saw she was too utterly preoccupied to attend to anything I said of
herself then, so I did not insist farther, and went up to the easel. I
was not an artist nor a critic, nor in any way qualified to be a judge
of painting as painting; but of genius, who is not a judge? In any art
it is recognisable, patent, obvious to all. There is no human clod, no
boor who is utterly insensible to its influence. It needs no education
to perceive its presence, though the ignorant could not tell you what
that presence was. Genius is as the sun itself: as universally
perceptible. Even the rustic clown feels the sun hot upon his face. Ask
him what sun is, and he cannot say, but he feels the difference between
sun and no sun. And the power in this rough drawing beat in upon my
perceptions as the sun beats on the labourer's face.

"I think it's a triumph," I answered. "You have caught a most startling
look of concentration."

"I am so glad!" she said, lightly.

The strain was over, and she was descending into ordinary mundane life
again, but the hand she had put on my arm chilled through the shirt
sleeve like ice.

"Do you recognise yourself?"

"Ye--es," I said, slowly; "except for that very glorified nose you've
given me!"

She laughed, and moved the paper off the easel.

"Now I just want to give you an idea of how the tamarisk will be
swayed," she said, holding a crayon between h