ival need be jealous of him. He will never clog the
galleries. He always paints on the same canvas, scraping off one picture
to make room for another. And you do not mind the loss of the old. You
live for the new.

His Majesty has no artistic memory. He is as young as he was the day
that he flung out his first tentative lunette after chaos. He is the
patron saint of all pilgrims from the city's struggle, where they found
no oases of rest. He melts "pasts" and family skeletons and hidden
stories of any kind whatsoever into the blue as a background with the
abandoned preoccupation of his own brushwork. His lieges, who seek
oblivion in the desert, need not worry about the water that will never
run over the millwheel again, or dwell in prophecy on floods to come. The
omnipotence of the moment transports and soothes them.

"Time is nothing!" says the Eternal Painter. "If you feel important,
remember that man's hectic bustling makes but worm-work on the planet.
Live and breathe joyfully and magnificently! Do not strain your eyes over
embroidery! Come to my open gallery! And how do you like the way I set
those silver clouds a-tumbling? Do you know anything better under the
dome of any church or capitol? Shall I bank them? Line them with purple?
It is done! But no! Let us wipe it all out, change the tint of our
background, and start afresh!"

With his eleven hundred million billionth sunset, or thereabouts, His
Majesty held a man and a woman who had met on the roof of the world in
thrall. He was lurid at the outset, dipping his camel's hair in at the
round furnace door sinking toward the hills, whose red vortex shot
tongues of flame into canyons and crevasses and drove out their lurking
shadows with the fire of its inquisition. The foliage of Little Rivers
became a grove of quivering leaves of gold, set on a vast beaten platter
of gold. And the man and the woman, like all things else in the
landscape, were suffused in this still, Parnassian, penetrating
brilliancy, which ought to make even a miser feel that his hoarded eagles
and sovereigns are ephemeral dross.

"I love it all--all the desert!" said Mary Ewold.

"And I, too!"

"I have for six years."

"I for five."

The sentences had struck clearly as answering chimes, impersonally, in
their preoccupied gazing.

"It gave me life!" he added.

"And it gave me life!"

Then they looked at each other in mutual surprise and understanding; each
in wonder that the other