are the only man who can tell her."

Wharton in his grave way came over to them, and first looking sadly at
Miss Brooke, then at the picture, said at length, as though to himself:
"I thought it was good when I did it. I think it is pretty good now.
What criticism do you make, Miss Brooke?"

Catherine was in mortal terror, but stood her ground like a heroine. "I
said it seemed to me dark, Mr. Wharton, and I asked why you made it so."

Wharton looked again at the picture and meditated over it. Then he said:
"Do you think it would be improved by being lighter?"

Although Catherine pleaded guilty to this shocking heresy, she did it
with so much innocence of manner that, in a few minutes, Wharton was
captured by her sweet face, and tried to make her understand his theory
that the merit of a painting was not so much in what it explained as in
what it suggested. Comments from the by-standers interfered with his
success. Hazard especially perplexed Catherine's struggling attention by
making fun of Wharton's lecture.

"Your idea of a picture," said he, "must seem to Miss Brooke like my
Cincinnati parishioner's idea of a corn-field. I was one day admiring
his field of Indian corn, which stretched out into the distance like
Lake Erie in a yellow sunset, when the owner, looking at his harvest as
solemnly as Wharton is looking at his picture, said that what he liked
most was the hogs he could see out of it."

"Well," said Wharton, "the Dutch made a good school out of men like him.
Art is equal to any thing. I will paint his hogs for him, slaughtered
and hung up by the hind legs, and if I know how to paint, I can put his
corn-field into them, like Ostade, and make the butchers glow with
emotion."

"Don't believe him, Miss Brooke," said Hazard. "He wants you to do his
own work, and if you give in to him you are lost. He covers a canvas
with paint and then asks you to put yourself into it. He might as well
hold up a looking-glass to you. Any man can paint a beautiful picture if
he could persuade Miss Brooke to see herself in it."

"What a pretty compliment," said Esther. "It is more flattering than the
picture."

"You can prove its truth, Miss Dudley," said Hazard. "It is easy to show
that I am right. Paint Miss Brooke yourself! Give to her the soul of the
Colorado plains! Show that beauty of subject is the right ideal! You
will annihilate Wharton and do an immortal work."

Hazard's knack of fixing an influence wherever he w