silence.

"That man, Neville, has never known the pain of work," said Gail,
deliberately. "When he has passed through it and it has made his hand
less steady, less omnipotent--"

"That's right. We can't love a man who has never endured what we have,"
said another. "No genius can hide his own immunity. That man paints with
an unscarred soul. A little hell for his--and no living painter could
stand beside him."

"Piffle," observed John Burleson.

Ogilvy said: "It is true, I think, that out of human suffering a quality
is distilled which affects everything one does. Those who have known
sorrow can best depict it--not perhaps most plausibly, but most
convincingly--and with fewer accessories, more reticence, and--better
taste."

"Why do you want to paint tragedies?" demanded Burleson.

"One need not paint them, John, but one needs to understand them to
paint anything else--needs to have lived them, perhaps, to become a
master of pictured happiness, physical or spiritual."

"That's piffle, too!" said Burleson in his rumbling bass--"like that
damn hen you lugged in--"

A shout of laughter relieved everybody.