r great fools, or else selfless to a degree that is rarer
even than philosophy...."

Gerald and Aurora crossed the room unhailed and entered the room beyond,
where dusty canvases, many deep, stood face to the wall.

He found the unframed painting of his mother and placed it on the easel.
The short winter day was waning, but near the window where the easel
stood there was still light enough to see by.

Aurora looked a long time without saying anything; Gerald did not speak
either. After the length of time one allows for the examination of a
picture, he took away that one and put another in its place; and so on
until he had shown her a dozen.

"I don't know what to say," she finally got out, as if from under a
crushing burden of difficulty to express herself.

"Please don't try!" he begged quickly. "And please not to care a bit if
you don't like them."

She let out her breath as at the easing of a strain. He heard it.

"I won't be so offensive," he went on, "as to say that in not liking
them you merely add yourself to the majority, nor yet that my feelings
are in no wise hurt by your failure to like them. But I do wish you to
know that I think it a sin and a shame to get a person like you, who
can't pretend a bit, before a lot of beastly canvases inevitably
repugnant to your mood and temperament, and make you uncomfortable with
the feeling that compliments are expected."

"All right, then; I won't tell any lies." She added in a sigh, "I did
want so much to like them!"

And he would never know what shining bubble burst there. She had wanted
so much, as she said, to like them, and, as she did not say, to buy some
of them, a great many of them, and make him rich with her gold.

He replied to her sigh:

"You are very kind."

After a moment spent gazing at the last painting placed on the easel, as
if she hoped tardily to discover some merit in it, she said:

"I don't know a thing about painting, so nothing I could say about your
way of doing it could matter one way or the other. But I have eyes to
see the way things and people look. Tell me, now, honest Injun, do they
look that way to you--the way you paint them?"

He laughed.

"Mrs. Hawthorne, no! Emphatically, no. And emphatically yes. When I look
at them as you do, in the street, across the table, they look to me
probably just as they do to you; but when I sit down to paint them--yes,
they look to me as I have shown them looking in these portraits."

"Bu