"You forget," I said, "if I could put the real sunlight into such a
picture, it would no longer be mine; I should be a borrower, not a
creator of light; I should be no more of an artist than I am now."

"You will always refuse to acknowledge it," she said; "but you can never
persuade me that you have not the power to create a sunbeam. An
imprisoned sunbeam! The idea is absurd."

"It is because the idea is so absurd," I said, "that, if I felt the
power were mine to imprison sunbeams, I should hardly care to repeat the
effort. The sunshine rests upon the grass, freely we say, but in truth
under some law that prevents its penetrating farther. A sunbeam existing
in the absence of the sun is, of course, an absurdity. Yet they are
there, the sunbeams of last spring, in your oval room, as I saw them one
day in May."

"Which convinces me," said Miss Stuart, "that you are an artist. That is
not real sunshine. You have created it. You are born for an artist-life.
Do not go back to your drudgery."

"Daily work," I answered, "must become mechanical work, if we perform it
in a servile way. A lawyer is perhaps inspired, when he is engaged in a
cause on which he thinks his reputation hangs; but, day by day, when he
goes down to the work that brings him his daily bread, he is quite as
likely to call it his drudgery as I my daily toil."

She left her seat and walked with me towards a painting which hung not
far from us. It represented sunset upon the water. "The tender-curving
lines of creamy spray" were gathering up the beach; the light was