his mother's entire content. She referred to him as His Majesty, brought
him gifts, surrounded him with adoration and incense.

"Great excitement in my shop to-day," she said, when they were down in
the studio, waiting for Martin. "I got a commission for a fountain to
stand in a public square in Columbus, Ohio."

"Good work, Bobs, we'll crack a bottle on it to-night and celebrate your
luck," cried Jerry, wringing her hand.

"I am delighted, dear," said Jane. "Any plans for it?"

"Not yet. I'm in that agonized state of groping for the idea. You
know--something inside clutching in the dark, darting here and there,
trying to get hold of things that slip away. No torture like it."

"Also no satisfaction like the minute when the idea comes, like the
night-blooming cereus, in the dark."

"Yes, that's the fun, and later, examining the leaves, the blossom, the
calyx, the stem, saying to yourself, 'Why, of course, how else?'"

"Queer, isn't it, how it comes to each one of us differently--one plant
for you, another for me, and still another for Jane," Jerry remarked.

"That is why it seems to me so important to cultivate your own, it is so
essentially yours," Jane said, in her serious way.

"Yes, if you don't forget that, at a big flower show, you may be a
violet in the chrysanthemum exhibit," Bobs teased.

Martin came in, on the laugh that followed.

"This sounds like a happy party," he remarked, as he greeted them.

"Bobs has an order, and she is exuberant," explained Jerry.

He proceeded to offer her various ridiculous suggestions as to fitting
subjects for the fountain. They all went into dinner, laughing. But
Jane's observing eye marked signs of weariness and feeling in Martin's
face. He was his usual, spontaneous, interested self to the casual
onlooker, but in moments when the others were talking, she caught him
off guard, mask down.

Bobs and Jerry fell into a discussion over a line which Bobs quoted from
Jane's book.

"But I don't agree with Jane's hypothesis, that every life is an end in
itself, because it cannot be lived again: that the personal reaction to
life, expressed in art, is of value, because it is individual."

"What is the individual's value, then?" Bobs demanded. "Yours, for
instance?"

"I'm part of a whole. I'm an eye or an ear in the big organism. My job
is no more important than--nor as important as--the function of the leg,
or the arm."

"Then you think it is just accident that you h