The light in the studio was growing dim. Goetze had risen to his feet and was walking back and forth in front of the portraits. When he spoke he seemed to have forgotten them, except as the representation of an abstract principle; or, perhaps, he was thinking of his own nature, and what his friend had said of it.

"Good and bad are relative terms only," he said, as one pronouncing a text. Every man fulfills his purpose. I can put a stroke of paint on my canvas, and you will call it white. I put another beside it, and by contrast the first appears gray. Still another, and the second has become gray, and the first still darker. And so on, until I have reached the purest white we know. It is the same with humanity. Men are only dark or light as they are contrasted with others; nor can they avoid the place they occupy on God's canvas any more than my colors can choose their places on mine. The world is a great picture. God is the greatest of all artists. His is the master hand—the unerring touch that lays on the lights, the half-tones and the shadows. Each fulfills its purpose. Without the shadows there would be no lights.

"What is true of masses is likewise true of individuals," he continued, after a moment's pause. "In a landscape, every blade of grass, every pebble, has its light and its dark side. If you see only the light side of an object, it is only because the shadow is turned from you. It is so with men; one side is sun, the other shadow. Sometimes the light, only, is presented to view, but the darker side is none the less there because unseen. Nature is never unbalanced. Whatever of brightness there is toward the sun there must be an equal amount of shadow opposing, with all the intergradations between. If the light is dim the shadow is soft; if the light is brilliant the shadow is black. Some of us are turned white side to the world, some the reverse; some show the white and the black alternately."

The man in the chair settled himself comfortably to listen. He liked nothing better than to see the artist in his present mood, offering a word now and then that was likely to draw out his peculiar ideas.

"You believe in fate, then, and the absence of moral freedom," he said reflectively.

"I believe nothing. Belief is not the word. What is, is right. To assert otherwise is an insult to the Supreme. He is all powerful, hence—wrong cannot exist."

"I should be glad to hear your argument in support of that position."

"Argument! It is a self-evident truth! Argument is not necessary! Argument is never necessary! If an assertion is not true no amount of discussion will make it so, while the truth requires no support."

The other had lighted a pipe, and was smoking lazily.

"Well," he said, as the artist paused; "at least those who have crossed over have solved the mystery."

"Oh, they have! And how do you know that anyone has crossed over? You do not believe in the mortality nor the slumber of the soul; no more do I; but time exists only with life. A man dies and in the same instant opens his eyes upon eternity, and yet a million of years may have been swept away in that instant. As a tired child you have fallen asleep. A moment later you have been called by your mother to breakfast. And yet, in that moment of dreamless sleep, the long winter night had passed. Adam, the first man, closing his eyes in death; you and I, who will do the same ten, twenty, forty years hence, and the generations who will follow us for a million years, perhaps, will waken to eternity, if there be a waking, in one and the same instant of time, without a knowledge of the intervening years. There were no years. Eternity has no beginning, no end, no measurement."

He paused a moment, then suddenly burst out again.

"Nothing in life is real—it is all a dream. You think your being is reality and that you hear my voice speaking. I tell you it is but fancy. We are the figures—the mimes in some vast hypnotic exhibition—the shadows in some gigantic spirit's disordered dream. Hypnotism," he continued, pursuing a line of thought which his impulsive words had suggested, "has, in fact, proven that no one can distinguish the real from the unreal. You remember, when we went to see Flint, the great hypnotist, how his subjects passed from one condition to another and took on any personality at the operator's will; capering and grimacing about the stage with all the characteristics and even the facial expression of monkeys, one minute, and simpering as silly school-girls the next; and to them it was all real—as real as this room, these bodies, these pictures are to us. I read some lines once that seemed to express the idea:

"I sometimes think life but a dream
Of some great soul in some great sphere,
And what appear as truths but seem,
And what seem truths do but appear."

He repeated these words with slow earnestness, adding solemnly, "Who knows? Who knows?"

The man who sat listening drew a long breath. He was a rich idler with a good deal of worldly wisdom, but he loved and admired his erratic friend. He felt that much of what he said was sophistry, wholly or in part; but there was a charm about the earnest manner, the musical voice, and the flashing brevity of statement, more pleasing to his ear than sounder logic from a surer reasoner.

It was nearly dark now in the studio. The artist halted in his march, and offered to light the gas.

"Not for the world, Julian; I am far too happy in the dark. I was just thinking what a glorious agitator you would make; you would carry all before you. I wonder you have never dabbled in politics or socialism. Now I think of it, I have never heard you mention these things. I suppose you belong to one or the other of the great parties, however."

"Politics? Party? Good heavens, no! I never meddle with such things; it is one step lower than I have ever gone."

"But a man must stand somewhere. He that stands nowhere stands upon nothing."

The artist paused before the open window and stood looking out upon the dusk of the little scented garden. A faint reflected glimmer from some far-away lamp dimly illuminated one side of his face, silhouetting his striking profile sharply against a ground of blackness.

"If you mean," he began, slowly, "that I should have some opinions, then I will tell you what they are.

"I believe neither in tariff nor trade. Currency nor coin. Traffic nor toil. I believe in nothing—but the absolute freedom of every living being. Freedom!—freedom from the curse of creeds, the blight of bigotry, and the leprosy of the law. Freedom to go and to come, to live and to die. Life without loathing, love without bondage. To live in some sunlit valley, where the bud is ever bursting into flower, the flower fading to fruit, and the fruit ripening to sustenance. The untouched bosom of Nature would yield enough for her children had not the curse of greed been implanted in their bosoms."

Goetze had turned away from the window and was again striding up and down the floor in the dark.

"A beautiful poem, Julian," said the other, dreamily; "but a sort of delightful barbarism, I'm afraid."

"Barbarism? No! A higher, purer intellectuality than we have ever yet known—a civilization that knows not the curse of avarice nor the miseries of crime—the weariness of wealth nor the pangs of poverty. The garden of Eden is still about us, but we have torn up the flowers, and desecrated it with the lust of gain. Man was never driven out of that garden. Greed was planted in his heart and he destroyed it."

"Come," he continued, suddenly changing the subject, "I have made you tired and hungry; let us go out, somewhere, to supper."

"Thanks," said the other, laughing; "I supposed a man in your condition had no need of bodily sustenance. You are comfortably situated here, Julian," he added, as they passed out into the street.

"Yes, it is quiet here—no bother with servants nor landladies. Once a week my washerwoman comes and stays to put my establishment in order; the rest of the time I am disturbed only by my sitters."

"You forget me."

"Yes, Harry," said the artist, taking his arm affectionately; "and by you, of course."