was easy to see that the room
was cold, that the woman with the pinched aristocratic nose, the little
shawl over her shoulders, was poor, determined and anxious. If Mrs. Foss
had said, "But Amabel never was as hollow-cheeked as that, nor ever
looked pathetic in the least," Gerald could only have answered, "I swear
to you this is how she looked to me on that day."

He studied the portrait of his mother, one of his earliest, bad in a
way, but excellent in the matter of likeness. His mother no more than
Amabel had been a pathetic person, Mrs. Foss would certainly have said.
To which Gerald might have answered that she was not so during an
afternoon call; but that the most characteristic thing about that gentle
and delicate woman had been the fact of her living so much in the life
of others and being open to endless sorrows through them. The dim
affectionate eyes, the deprecating half-smile of his mother, engaged
sympathy for the unfair plight.

Last, he took up a portrait of Violet. She had been in the perfection of
young beauty; she had had no capacity for deep feeling, really,--why did
an aroma of sadness escape from that dainty colored shadow of her? Why,
but because of the artist's yearning sense that beauty is transitory,
and the loveliest girl subject to destiny, and the future full of
pitfalls for the fragility of all flesh!

"Imagine a barnyard fowl, a common white hen pecking among the gravel,"
Gerald once illustrated his view-point, "and imagine hovering over it a
hawk, which it hasn't seen. Does it make no difference in your sense of
the hen that _you_ see the hawk?"

"It comes to this," Leslie on a certain occasion summed up Gerald's
case: "Gerald isn't satisfied to paint the thing that's before him. All
he cares to paint is the soul of things, and what you finally see
expressed on the canvas is his pity for everything that has the
misfortune to be born into an unsatisfactory world. Gerald can't see a
thing as being common: the moment he narrows his eyes to look for
purposes of art, it becomes to him exceptional, unique. I asked him
once, as a joke, to paint me a simple, large, bright orange squash, in a
field. And he did. A masterpiece. One can't say that the squash isn't
large, orange, and true to life. But what a squash! It has an amount of
personal distinction, an air of rarity and remoteness, that would make
you think twice, nay, three times, before making such a precious product
of the sacred earth i