ng gazed stupidly at him, failing of speech. The little man drank
again when the brandy came, and Ewing wondered if he could be drunk. He
feared not. The men he had known in the hills were noisy in drink--they
chiefly yelled. And Teevan was quiet. If his eyes stared vacantly at
intervals, if he clipped syllables from his words, and seemed to attack
his speech with extreme caution, those might be only the results of his
emotion. But what monstrous stuff was this he uttered! What unbelievable
stuff! In a fever of apprehension he wondered what Teevan would say
next.

But the little man dismissed woman, dismissed her with an exquisite
shrug, to speak of his young friend's work, and of painting at large.

"A suggestion of the true manner in that late thing of yours, my boy,
really, a hint of Dupre, and he was a colorist of the first rank. And
there are fewer colorists, genuine masters of tone, than you'd think.
Turner was one, to be sure, but Millet had a restricted sense of color.
Corot was great only within a narrow range. Rousseau was only a bit
broader, robuster. There's a wretchedly defective color sense in many of
the old masters, and in heaven knows how many of the young ones. France
must take the blame for that, I'm sure you'd agree with me. The academic
sentiment there runs to form and against color. They insist that
colorists do little work. It's not an unplausible sophism. One has only
to begin counting to see that--counting the host of little niggling,
mechanical stipplers it's responsible for. It's true, color has its
pitfalls and its gins. There's a temptation to shirk form. Many an
aspiring colorist has become at last a mushy mannerist, as vicious in
his influence as the chaps who never get beyond smart drawing and clever
grouping." The little man was "squeezing" his eyes now as if he judged a
row of paintings. He talked on and drank frequently.

But Ewing left as soon as he could do so. Teevan pressed his hand with
rare cordiality at parting, as if Ewing were one person in the world
still worthy of belief. He wandered blindly home, awkwardly trying to
mold this new chaos into an understandable scheme of things. He fell
instinctively back on his studies of the drama.

Many nights he had sat before the painted curtain to feast a questing
mind on the life it lifted to reveal. He had found its revelations more
intimate, more specific, than those of the life outside, and he had
seemed to learn many things. Lack