of the tender, earnest, truthful face before him. As he looked, he smiled at his friend's prophecy.
"This is my talisman," he said; and he raised the picture to his lips.
An evening or two later, as Easelmann was putting his brushes into water, Greenleaf came into his studio. The cloud-compelling meerschaums were produced, and they sat in high-backed chairs, watching the thin wreaths of smoke as they curled upwards to the skylight. The sale of pictures had taken place, and the prices, though not high enough to make the fortunes of the artists, were yet reasonably remunerative; the pictures were esteemed almost as highly, Easelmann thought, as the decorative sketches in an omnibus.
"And did Sandford buy your picture, Greenleaf?"
"Yes, I believe so. In fact, I saw it in his drawing-room, yesterday."
"Certainly; how could I have forgotten it? I must have been thinking of the animated picture there. What is paint, when one sees such a glowing, glancing, fascinating, arch, lovely, tantalizing"———
"Don't! Don't pelt me with your parts of speech!"
"I was trying to select the right adjective."
"Well, you need not shower down a basketful, merely to pick out one."
"But confess, now, you are merely the least captivated?"
"Not the least."
"No little palpitations at the sound of her name? No short breath nor upturned eyes? No vague longings nor 'billowy unrest'?"
"None."
"You slept well last night?"
"Perfectly."
"No dreams of a sea-green palace, with an Undine in wavy hair, and a big brother with fan-coral plumes, who afterwards turned into a sea-dog?"
"No,—I cut the late suppers you tempt me with, and preserve my digestion."
"A great mistake! One good dream in a nightmare will give you more poetical ideas than you can paint in a month: I mean a reasonable nightmare, that you can ride,—not one that rides you. The imagination then seems to scintillate nothing but beautiful images."
"I don't care to become a red-hot iron for the sake of seeing the sparks I might radiate."
"Prosaic again! Now sin and sorrow have their advantages; the law of compensation, you see. Poets, according to Shelley, learn in suffering what they teach in song. And if novelists were always scrupulous, what do you think they would write? Only milk-and-water proprieties, tamely-virtuous platitudes. Do you think Dickens never saw a taproom or a thief's den?—or that Thackeray is unacquainted with the "Cave of Harmony"? No,—all the piquancy of life comes from the slight soupçon of wickedness wherewithal we season it."
"I like amazingly to have you wander off in this way; you are always entertaining, whether your ethics are sound or not."
"Don't trouble yourself about ethics. You and I are artists; we want effects, contrasts; we must have our enthusiasms, our raptures, and our despair."
"You ride a theory well."
"Now, my dear Greenleaf, listen. Kindly I say it, but you are a trifle too innocent, too placid,—in short, too youthful. To paint, you must be intense; to be intense, you must feel; and—you see I come back on the sweep of the circle—to feel, one must have incentives, objects."
"So, you will roast your own liver to make a pâté."
"Better so than to have the Promethean vulture peck it out for you."
"Well, if I am as you say, what am I to do? I am docile, to-day."
"Fall in love."
"I have tried the experiment."
"It must have been with some insipid girl, not out of her teens, odorous of bread and butter, innocent of wiles, and
