ou know, painted in the late afternoon. Ben is set on
my sending it down to the Durango fair next month."

It was the lake, indeed, but, alas! an elaborate, a labored parody of
it. The dead blue water, the granite wall evenly gray in shadow,
garishly pink where it caught the sun, the opaque green of the trees,
the carefully arranged clouds in the flat blue sky--all smirked
conscious burlesque. It recalled the things in gilt frames which Mrs.
Laithe remembered to have seen in front of "art emporiums," on
Fourteenth Street, tagged "Genuine Oil Painting," the "$12.00" carefully
crossed out and "$3.98" written despairingly below to tempt the alert
connoisseur.

She knew the artist's eyes were upon her in appeal for praise. She drew
in her under lip and narrowed her eyes as one in the throes of critical
deliberation.

"Yes, I should recognize the spot at once," she dared to say at last.
"How well you've drawn the rock."

"I hoped you'd like it. I don't mind telling you I put in a lot of time
on that thing. I 'carried it along' as my father used to say. I don't
believe I could better that. And here are some others."

He displayed them without further urging, his shyness vanished by his
enthusiasm, in his eye a patent confusion of pride and anxiety. She
found them in quality like the first. In one the valley of the
Wimmenuche from the east bench was as precisely definite as a
topographical map; in another the low-lying range of hills to the south
had lost all their gracious and dignifying haze.

"They are immensely interesting," observed his critic with animation,
"It may be"--she searched for a tempering phrase--"it is just possible
there's a trick of color you need to learn yet. You know color is so
difficult to convict. It's shifty, evasive, impalpable. I dare say that
lake isn't as flatly blue as you've painted it, nor that cliff as flatly
pink in sunlight. And those hills--isn't there a mistiness that softens
their lines and gives one a sense of their distance? Color is _so_
difficult--_so_ tricky!"

She had spoken rapidly, her eyes keeping to the poor things before her.
Now she ventured a glance at the painter and met a puzzled seriousness
in his look.

"You may be right," he assented at last. "Sometimes I've felt I was on
the wrong track. I see what you mean. You mean you could reach over a
mile and pick up the ranch house at Bar-7--that it's like a little
painted doll's house; and you mean you could push your