light or shade. His colour
was good, running to purples, reds, and admirable greens, full of
bitumen and raw sienna.

Though he had no idea of composition, he was clever enough to
acknowledge it. His finished pictures were broad reaches of landscape,
deserts, shores, and moors in which he placed solitary figures of men or
animals in a way that was very effective--as, for instance, a great
strip of shore and in the foreground the body of a drowned sailor; a
lion drinking in the midst of an immense Sahara; or, one that he called
"The Remnant of an Army," a dying war horse wandering on an empty plain,
the saddle turned under his belly, his mane and tail snarled with burrs.

Some time before there had come to him the idea for a great picture. It
was to be his first masterpiece, his salon picture when he should get to
Paris. A British cavalryman and his horse, both dying of thirst and
wounds, were to be lost on a Soudanese desert, and in the middle
distance on a ridge of sand a lion should be drawing in upon them,
crouched on his belly, his tail stiff, his lower jaw hanging. The
melodrama of the old English "Home Book of Art" still influenced
Vandover. He was in love with this idea for a picture and had determined
to call it "The Last Enemy." The effects he wished to produce were
isolation and intense heat; as to the soldier, he was as yet undecided
whether to represent him facing death resignedly, calmly, or grasping
the barrel of his useless rifle, determined to fight to the last.

Vandover loved to paint and to draw. He was perfectly contented when his
picture was "coming right," and when he felt sure he was doing good
work. He often did better than he thought he would, but never so well as
he thought he _could_.

However, it bored him to work very hard, and when he did not enjoy his
work he stopped it at once. He would tell himself on these occasions
that one had to be in the mood and that he should wait for the
inspiration, although he knew very well how absurd such excuses were,
how false and how pernicious.

That certain little weakness of Vandover's character, his
self-indulgence, _had_ brought him to such a point that he thought he
had to be amused. If his painting amused him, very good; if not, he
found something else that would.

On the following Monday as he worked in the life-class, Vandover was
thinking, or, rather, trying not to think, of what he had done the
Sunday morning previous when he had gone to