"I might," he said, remembering her requisition.

"Come soon. Maybe you could put an oar in. She needs help, poor girl!"

"Help to Electra's favor?"

Peter nodded into the grass.

"You could do it better than I. You can do everything better. You
mustn't forget, Pete, that you're the Fortunate Youth."

There was something wistful in his tone. It stirred in Peter old
loyalties, old responses, and he immediately wondered what Osmond wanted
of him that was not expressed. Osmond had made no emotional demands upon
him, as to his profession, but Peter always had a sense that his brother
was sitting by, watching the boiling of the pot. This was a cheerful
companionship when the pot was active; not now, as it cooled. He threw
out a commonplace at random, from his uneasy consciousness.

"Art isn't the biggest thing, old boy."

"What is?"

Now Peter rolled over again, and regarded him with glowing eyes. To
Osmond, who was beginning to know his temperament better than he had
known it in all the years of the lad's journey upon an upward track,
that glance told of remembered phrases and a dominating personality that
had made the phrases stick.

"It's to give one man who works with his hands fresher air to breathe,
fewer hours' work, a better bed."

"You're an artist, Pete. Don't forget that."

"I don't. But it isn't the biggest thing."

"If you should paint a picture for that workingman to look at while he
says his prayers? what then?"

"You don't understand, Osmond," said the boy. "Labor! Labor is the
question of the day."

Osmond looked over at a field of seedlings where five men with bent
backs were weeding and where he himself had been bending until now. He
smiled a little.

"I understand work, boy," he said gently. "Only I can't make hot
distinctions. The workingman is as sacred to me as you are, and you are
as sacred as the workingman."

Peter was making little nosegays of grass and weeds, and laying them in
methodical rows.

"I can't paint, Osmond," he said abruptly. "These things are just
crowding me."

"What things?"

"Capital. Labor."

Osmond was silent a long time because he had too many things to say, all
of them impossible. He felt hot tears in his eyes from a passion of
revolt against the lad's wastefulness. He felt the shame of such
squandering. To him, all the steps in the existence by which his own
being had been preserved meant thrift and penury. He had conserved every
energy. He had liv