elieve all that?'

'There's no question of belief or disbelief. That's the law, and you
take it or refuse it as you please. I try to obey, but I can't, and
then my work turns bad on my hands. Under any circumstances, remember,
four-fifths of everybody's work must be bad. But the remnant is worth
the trouble for it's own sake.'

'Isn't it nice to get credit even for bad work?'

'It's much too nice. But---- May I tell you something? It isn't a pretty
tale, but you're so like a man that I forget when I'm talking to you.'

'Tell me.'

'Once when I was out in the Soudan I went over some ground that we had
been fighting on for three days. There were twelve hundred dead; and we
hadn't time to bury them.'

'How ghastly!'

'I had been at work on a big double-sheet sketch, and I was wondering
what people would think of it at home. The sight of that field taught
me a good deal. It looked just like a bed of horrible toadstools in all
colours, and--I'd never seen men in bulk go back to their beginnings
before. So I began to understand that men and women were only material
to work with, and that what they said or did was of no consequence.
See? Strictly speaking, you might just as well put your ear down to the
palette to catch what your colours are saying.'

'Dick, that's disgraceful!'

'Wait a minute. I said, strictly speaking. Unfortunately, everybody must
be either a man or a woman.'

'I'm glad you allow that much.'

'In your case I don't. You aren't a woman. But ordinary people, Maisie,
must behave and work as such. That's what makes me so savage.' He hurled
a pebble towards the sea as he spoke. 'I know that it is outside my
business to care what people say; I can see that it spoils my output
if I listen to 'em; and yet, confound it all,'--another pebble flew
seaward,--'I can't help purring when I'm rubbed the right way. Even when
I can see on a man's forehead that he is lying his way through a clump
of pretty speeches, those lies make me happy and play the mischief with
my hand.'

'And when he doesn't say pretty things?'

'Then, belovedest,'--Dick grinned,--'I forget that I am the steward of
these gifts, and I want to make that man love and appreciate my work
with a thick stick. It's too humiliating altogether; but I suppose even
if one were an angel and painted humans altogether from outside, one
would lose in touch what one gained in grip.'

Maisie laughed at the idea of Dick as an angel.

'But you seem to