"If you don't play the game, I don't know who does."

"Well!" Osmond smiled a little, whimsically. "Maybe I do; but I play
with counters."

Peter was not especially ready, save with a brush in his hand. He wanted
to say something to the effect that Osmond was playing the biggest of
all games, with the visible universe against him; but he hardly knew how
to put it. It seemed, though, as if he might some time paint it into a
picture. But Osmond was recognizing the danger of soft implication, and
bluffly turned the talk.

"Well, Pete, you've done it, haven't you?"

There was no possibility of affecting to misunderstand. Peter knew what
he had gone to Paris for, five years ago, and why Osmond had been
sending him the steady proceeds of the garden farm. He was to prove
himself, take his talent in his hand and mould it and turn it about with
a constant will, and shape a cup to hold the drink that makes the gods
jealous and men delirious with adulation. Peter was to live at his ease
in Paris, sparing nothing that would keep him well and strong of heart,
so that he could paint the best portraits in the world. Peter knew he
had begun to paint the best portraits in the world, because he had done
many good ones and one actual marvel, and suddenly, as it sometimes is
in art after we have been patient and discouraged, the whole task seemed
to him a light and easy one. In his extraordinary youth he had the
freshness of his brain, his quick eye and obedient hand, and he felt,
lightly and gayly, that he was rich,--but rich in a world where there
was plenty more of whatever he might lose.

"I guess so," he said, returning to the speech of his youth. "And I can
do it twice, old man. I can do it a hundred times."

Osmond stopped and laid a hand on a boulder at the termination of their
way, where the lane opened into plowed fields. He looked off through the
distance as if he saw the courts of the world and all the roads that run
to fame. His eyes were burning. The hand trembled upon the rock.

"By George!" he said, "it's amazing."

"What is, Osmond?"

"It's amazing that the world can hold so much for one man. You wouldn't
think there would be water enough in all the rivers for one man to drink
so deep. What does Electra say?"

"About the painting? Nothing yet."

"Didn't you speak of it? Why, you're covered with laurel, boy, like
Jack-in-the-Green. She couldn't help seeing it."

Peter, brought back to that luckless interview