day there. We can show them that two can play at that game."

III.

Arnus Beaton's studio looked at first glance like many other painters'
studios. A gray wall quadrangularly vaulted to a large north light; casts
of feet, hands, faces hung to nails about; prints, sketches in oil and
water-color stuck here and there lower down; a rickety table, with paint
and palettes and bottles of varnish and siccative tossed comfortlessly on
it; an easel, with a strip of some faded mediaeval silk trailing from it;
a lay figure simpering in incomplete nakedness, with its head on one
side, and a stocking on one leg, and a Japanese dress dropped before it;
dusty rugs and skins kicking over the varnished floor; canvases faced to
the mop-board; an open trunk overflowing with costumes: these features
one might notice anywhere. But, besides, there was a bookcase with an
unusual number of books in it, and there was an open colonial
writing-desk, claw-footed, brass-handled, and scutcheoned, with foreign
periodicals--French and English--littering its leaf, and some pages of
manuscript scattered among them. Above all, there was a sculptor's
revolving stand, supporting a bust which Beaton was modelling, with an
eye fixed as simultaneously as possible on the clay and on the head of
the old man who sat on the platform beside it.

Few men have been able to get through the world with several gifts to
advantage in all; and most men seem handicapped for the race if they have
more than one. But they are apparently immensely interested as well as
distracted by them. When Beaton was writing, he would have agreed, up to
a certain point, with any one who said literature was his proper
expression; but, then, when he was painting, up to a certain point, he
would have maintained against the world that he was a colorist, and
supremely a colorist. At the certain point in either art he was apt to
break away in a frenzy of disgust and wreak himself upon some other. In
these moods he sometimes designed elevations of buildings, very striking,
very original, very chic, very everything but habitable. It was in this
way that he had tried his hand on sculpture, which he had at first
approached rather slightingly as a mere decorative accessory of
architecture. But it had grown in his respect till he maintained that the
accessory business ought to be all the other way: that temples should be
raised to enshrine statues, not statues made to ornament temples; that
w