unimaginative--the solid, essentials of the nation--had lingered
fascinated! This was the man--across there on a stepladder. And he was
evidently not yet thirty; and his name was Neville and his friends
called him Kelly.

"Yes," she said, diffidently, "I cared for it."

"Really?"

He caught her eye, laughed, and went on with his work.

"The critics were savage," he said. "Lord! It hurts, too. But I've
simply got to be busy. What good would it do me to sit down and draw
casts with a thin, needle-pointed stick of hard charcoal. Not that they
say I can't draw. They admit that I can. They admit that I can paint,
too."

He laughed, stretched his arms:

"Draw! A blank canvas sets me mad. When I look at one I feel like
covering it with a thousand figures twisted into every intricacy and
difficulty of foreshortening! I wish I were like that Hindu god with a
dozen arms; and even then I couldn't paint fast enough to satisfy what
my eyes and brain have already evoked upon an untouched canvas.... It's
a sort of intoxication that gets hold of me; I'm perfectly cool, too,
which seems a paradox but isn't. And all the while, inside me, is a
constant, hushed kind of laughter, bubbling, which accompanies every
brush stroke with an 'I told you so!'--if you know what I'm trying to
say--_do_ you?"