be accomplished.

At the bars of the grassy pasture slope she dropped me a curtsey,
declining very shyly to let me carry her lacteal paraphernalia.

So I continued on to the bungalow garden, where Blythe sat on a camp
stool under a green umbrella, painting a picture of something or other.

"Mr. Blythe!" I cried, striving to subdue my enthusiasm. "The eyes of the
scientific world are now open upon this house! The searchlight of Fame is
about to be turned upon you--"

"I prefer privacy," he interrupted. "That's why I came here. I'll be
obliged if you'll turn off that searchlight."

"But, my dear Mr. Blythe--"

"I want to be let alone," he repeated irritably. "I came out here to
paint and to enjoy privately my own paintings."

If what stood on his easel was a sample of his pictures, nobody was
likely to share his enjoyment.

"Your work," said I, politely, "is--is----"

"Is what!" he snapped. "_What_ is it--if you think you know?"

"It is entirely, so to speak, _per se_--by itself--"

"What the devil do you mean by that?"

I looked at his picture, appalled. The entire canvas was one monotonous
vermillion conflagration. I examined it with my head on one side, then on
the other side; I made a funnel with both hands and peered intently
through it at the picture. A menacing murmuring sound came from him.

"Satisfying--exquisitely satisfying," I concluded. "I have often seen
such sunsets--"

"What!"

"I mean such prairie fires--"

"Damnation!" he exclaimed. "I'm painting a bowl of nasturtiums!"

"I was speaking purely in metaphor," said I with a sickly smile. "To me
a nasturtium by the river brink is more than a simple flower. It is a
broader, grander, more magnificent, more stupendous symbol. It may mean
anything, everything--such as sunsets and conflagrations and
Goetterdaemmerungs! Or--" and my voice was subtly modulated to an
appealing and persuasive softness--"it may mean nothing at all--chaos,
void, vacuum, negation, the exquisite annihilation of what has never even
existed."

He glared at me over his shoulder. If he was infected by Cubist
tendencies he evidently had not understood what I said.

"If you won't talk about my pictures I don't mind your investigating this
district," he grunted, dabbing at his palette and plastering a wad of
vermilion upon his canvas; "but I object to any public invasion of my
artistic privacy until I am ready for it."

"When will that be?"

He pointed with one vermil