til he loved and loathed her. The master came and went. Sometimes he
ignored Ewing. When he did notice him it was always with a fresh blow on
the sunk heart of the boy. Once he sat in his place and ran some of his
own brusque, effective lines along the figure, the lines that every
other youth in the room punctiliously imitated. They mingled with
Ewing's strokes as a driving rain mingles with a bed of flowers.

"If you'd only give up your damned little way," he complained.

"I wish you'd explain a bit," pleaded the boy.

"Old Velvet" turned to the spectacled young man. "Give him your study.
There, do it like that."

Then came the beginning of the end. He lost himself in a crawling
blindness of imitation. The old power that had made him draw without
knowing how he did it gathered its splendid garments and withdrew as
mysteriously as it had once come to possess him. He drew, but he would
no longer have recognized what he did as the work of his own hand. He
thought of Griggs, who had said, "Style?--I'd know a scrap of your stuff
if I found it in an ash barrel in Timbuctoo!"

The thought of those friendly men knowing his degradation was another
stone on the grave of his self-esteem. It was this that made him wait
when the others had gone one night, to take down that first crucified
drawing from the wall where it had remained, torn and hanging by one
tack.

"Will you give it to me?" said a voice, and, as he did not care one way
or the other, the spectacled young man put it in his portfolio.
Afterwards Ewing thought of asking him why he wanted it, but he did not
come back again. He had been advanced to the life class.

The master did not speak to Ewing again. He made, at intervals as he
passed, the pantomime of rubbing out. And Ewing obeyed, beginning each
time the task that grew day by day more hatefully useless. In the
beginning he had felt that if he could get that plaster woman off by
himself he could draw her. The long habit of solitude had left him
confounded by the crowd. There had been something almost shameful to him
about drawing publicly, and he had the impulse to curl an arm about his
sketch to hide it a little as he worked. He felt sick with the hot, dry
air and the breathing of the stallful of men. When the door was opened
the odor of turpentine came from the room where they were painting. It
had for him a familiar, happy smell.

"I wish I could go in there," he said once to a fat youth beside him.

"Th