he stormed at the
imbecility of his kind!

"It's this damned idea of realism that's killing art!" he shrieked one
day, on the rocks at Concarneau. "Who wants things natural? If Jones and
Smith could be taught by reiterating life as it is, the race of fools
would soon become extinct. My neighbor loves his neighbor's wife, and
they go off together and there is murder done. Does the reading of this
in book or paper stop my going off with the woman I love if I have the
chance? Not a whit! Art must raise one's ideals. It's the only thing
that helps you, me, any one!"

Or, again, and this was at twilight, waiting under the old crucifix for
the herring-boats to come in: "Anybody with eyesight can imitate the
_actual_. The _real_! What has the creative mind to do with that? It is
not one great and innocent-minded girl you are to represent in
Marguerite, it is _all_ girlhood in its innocence and surrender."

And another time, on the way home from Pont-Aven:

"Women of detail, women who indulge themselves in soul-wearying
repetition of the little affairs of life, have driven more men to
perdition than all the Delilahs ever created."

And Katrine and he laughed together at his anathema, and went forward
into a dusky French twilight, singing as they went.

Around her room she pinned the written slips which he gave at every
lesson, Scripture which seemed perverted to uses other than its own:

"He that endureth to the end, the same shall be saved.

"Live with Goethe's Faust--learn it. You will understand Gounod's
better.

"All art comes from the same kind of nature. If you didn't sing
yours, you would paint it, carve it, write it, play it out; for, if
it is in you to create something artistic, nothing human can stop
your doing it.

"There are no mute, inglorious Miltons. Every one who has the
qualifications for success succeeds."

As time passed the letters to her unknown benefactor became more and
more intimate in tone by reason of her race and youth. No answer ever
coming to any of them, it was as though her thoughts were written and
cast into the eternal silence.

Upon the second anniversary of her farewell to Francis Ravenel, which
was soon after her return from Brittany to Paris, she took from the
depths of an old trunk the mementos of that time which seemed to her so
far away. Such trifling things: a pine cross tied with blue ribbon; a
grass ring which he had made for