r. Run in often and make yourselves at
home with each other," he concluded cordially. "I must hurry back and
finish a fight."

"May I look?" asked Ewing, his eyes running about the room to the many
canvases.

"My summer's work is there--Look? yes; but I can't promise what you'll
see. You bring your own eyes. I can't make eyes, too. If I only could--"
He spoke with a slow, soft gentleness, his blue eyes half shut and
dreamily distant. As Ewing turned to study a landscape leaning against
the wall on a table near by, the painter climbed to his stool and twined
his thin legs confusingly among its supports. Then facing his canvas and
working a brush into the color on his palette he continued:

"Line is a fact. Color is only a sensation. Anyone can prove line, but
to know color you must have imagination. If you lack that and do have a
gift for humorous abuse you can be an art critic and make quite a bit
of money, I'm told." He had begun to paint as he talked. He spoke with
the same slow gentleness, even when a hint of seasoned bitterness
betrayed itself.

One close look at the sketches about him had made Ewing rejoice that his
own paintings were safe with Ben Crider. He studied the canvases before
him with pleasure and dismay: wooded hills, grassy meadows, a park slope
with a single birch; mist rising over a marsh; a country road narrowing
into a blaze of sumach. They showed plainly enough, he thought, that
color must be conveyed rather by implication than by blunt directness,
and there, he felt, had been his own great blunder. He had been brutally
direct.

Some of the pictures before him left him wanting a sharper definition of
line, a more explicit modeling of surface, a treatment less timid, and
the color itself, though it never failed to interest him, often puzzled
or even irritated. He sought for words to disclose what he felt, his
admiration for some of the sketches, his doubt or his rank disbelief as
to others. But the old man suddenly swept the half-formed sentences from
his mind.

A crash of falling furniture had resounded from the room of Dallas,
forward on their own floor. From the studios below came other crashes,
the noise of falling bodies, and a ringing, metallic clangor. Sydenham
had paused at the first crash, then skipped nimbly from his stool,
shouting gleefully, "There goes Griggs's suit of armor!" Then, to
Ewing's amazement, he twitched the end of a cord that led to a high
mahogany sideboard, causi