ed, he knew not how.

His friend, Randall Teevan, almost an intimate since the night they
dined together, daily predicted great works of him. Where the careless
picture makers of the Rookery were content with assurances that he could
turn out marketable "stuff," Teevan showed him far and lofty eminences
that he might scale, had he a spirit for the feat.

Undoubtedly there were obstacles that would daunt a less spirited
novice, or one with less than the supreme powers of his young friend,
but he, the intrepid, the enduring one, could surmount them. The danger
in this time of 'prenticeship, Teevan suggested, was sluggish content
with a cheap facility. The tyro learns to do a thing that sells, and
remains commercially solvent but, spiritually, an example of arrested
development--artistically dead.

He left Ewing at these times with a sense of his present futility, but
also with a genial pity for the men who were doing things to sell--and
selling them; all unconscious of the remote, the vacant summits, of
true art. A little while before he would have rejoiced that his work
could appear beside the work of these men. That would have been a
triumph glorious enough. But he could no longer desire so mean a
success. He must strive for the higher things, if for no other reason,
because this fastidious critic expected him to accomplish them. He could
not affront that captious taste with things done for a dollar. Teevan,
it seemed, had found life wearing on his dearest illusions. Contact with
the world had left him little to believe in. Yet he confessed to believe
in Ewing; confessed it with a shamed, humorous _naivetee_, and with
pleasant half doubts, as a man of tried unbelief laying a bed to fall
back on at his next undeceiving.

Ewing was fired to high resolve by this witty, this tender betrayal of
confidence in his powers. He could not bear to think that his friend
should one day find him, too, a bit of specious insincerity. He
consecrated himself to guard this last illusion. It was a pleasure, a
duty, and an ambition whose rewards would magnify them both.

The hill boy no longer yearned solitary in the crowd for a day with Ben
Crider, or perhaps an evening with him of little easy silences. Teevan
filled his needs. In some sort the little man became his idol; a
constant presence before which every act of his days must be judged.
Teevan was a smiling but inexorable arbiter of his destiny: a judge
humane but incorruptible, a