"You mean?" demanded Kenny coldly.

"I mean," flung out Brian, "that I'm tired of it all. I'm sick to
death of painting sunsets."

Garry's startled glance sought and found a mediocre sunset on an easel.
Brian went in for sunsets. He said so himself with an inexplicable air
of weariness and disgust. He knew how to make them.

Kenny's glance too had found the sunset. It stood beside a landscape,
brilliant and unforgettable, of his own. Both men looked away. Brian
smiled.

"You see?" he said quietly.

"Sunsets!" stammered Kenny, perversely taking up the keynote of his
son's rebellion literally. "Sunsets! I warned you, Brian--"

"Sunsets," said Brian, "and everything else you put on canvas with
paint and brush. I can't paint. You know it. Garry knows it. I know
it. I've painted, Kenny, merely to please you. I've nothing more than
a commonplace skill whipped into shape by an art school. Aerial
battlefields--my sunsets--in more ways than one. I paint 'em because
they happen to be the thing in Nature that thrills me most. And when I
fire to a thing, most always I can manage somehow. You yourself have
engineered for me every profitable commission I've ever had. What's
more, Kenny, if ever once you'd put into real art the dreadful energy
I've put into my mediocrity--"

"You mean I'm lazy?" interrupted Kenny, bristling.