THE days that followed were marked for Ewing with a puzzling discouragement; puzzling, because there had been no failure. A failure would have left him reliant, however battered, but nothing good had been disproved. He was fighting some black doubt of himself, insidiously nursed, he knew not how.

His friend, Randall Teevan, almost an intimate since the night they dined together, daily predicted great works of him. Where the careless picture makers of the Rookery were content with assurances that he could turn out marketable "stuff," Teevan showed him far and lofty eminences that he might scale, had he a spirit for the feat.

Undoubtedly there were obstacles that would daunt a less spirited novice, or one with less than the supreme powers of his young friend, but he, the intrepid, the enduring one, could surmount them. The danger in this time of 'prenticeship, Teevan suggested, was sluggish content with a cheap facility. The tyro learns to do a thing that sells, and remains commercially solvent but, spiritually, an example of arrested development—artistically dead.

He left Ewing at these times with a sense of his present futility, but also with a genial pity for the men who were doing things to sell—and selling them; all unconscious of the remote, the vacant summits, of true art. A little while before he would have rejoiced that his work could appear beside the work of these men. That would have been a triumph glorious enough. But he could no longer desire so mean a success. He must strive for the higher things, if for no other reason, because this fastidious critic expected him to accomplish them. He could not affront that captious taste with things done for a dollar. Teevan, it seemed, had found life wearing on his dearest illusions. Contact with the world had left him little to believe in. Yet he confessed to believe in Ewing; confessed it with a shamed, humorous naÍvetÉe, and with pleasant half doubts, as a man of tried unbelief laying a bed to fall back on at his next undeceiving.

Ewing was fired to high resolve by this witty, this tender betrayal of confidence in his powers. He could not bear to think that his friend should one day find him, too, a bit of specious insincerity. He consecrated himself to guard this last illusion. It was a pleasure, a duty, and an ambition whose rewards would magnify them both.

The hill boy no longer yearned solitary in the crowd for a day with Ben Crider, or perhaps an evening with him of little easy silences. Teevan filled his needs. In some sort the little man became his idol; a constant presence before which every act of his days must be judged. Teevan was a smiling but inexorable arbiter of his destiny: a judge humane but incorruptible, a man experienced in the obliquities of human nature, but never tolerant of these.

Teevan showed him pictures, the work of masters, piloting him through galleries with instructive comment. Ewing instinctively felt the accuracy of his taste, and divined the soundness of his technical knowledge. Often he overlooked a blemish of bad drawing till Teevan pointed it out. Often Teevan defined to his eye some masterly bit of lining in a picture otherwise hopeless. And of color, that splendid mystery, thing of trick and passion, the little man discoursed with rare sanity.

After these provings of his expertness, Ewing was humble when Teevan chose to point out the more striking deficiencies of his own work. If Teevan made him feel that he must unlearn the vicious little he knew, he performed the duty with a tact that left the youth as large with gratitude as with discouragement. It was by Teevan's counsel that he went to the school. The men of the Rookery tried to dissuade him from that.

"They can't give you anything you haven't got," warned Baldwin. "And if you don't act stubborn they may spoil what you have. You've learned your A B C's, and they'll only tell you at the school to learn them another way. They'll make you feel like a clumsy ass. Stay away."

Well-meant advice, but superficial, as Teevan observed when he heard of it.

"Your friend confirms what I suspected," he went on, with a pleasant glint in his eyes. "Those chaps would have you become a decent hack on the pitiful facility you've already acquired. Pitiful, mark me, as compared with your capacity. But I've learned to expect little in this world of weak purpose. I dare say you won't endure it long at the school. I grant you a fortnight there; then you'll tell me you give up."

He began his lessons at the League next day, fired with intent to please his friend. He would fail, yes—fail seventy times seven, but he would stand up.

He went, however, a little weighed down by the memory of his various advisers. From the entrance he was directed above by an official-looking person who yawned. Then he found himself in one of many cramped, stall-like compartments, facing a plaster woman who crouched on one knee. His position was between two youths who were annoyed by his nearness. When he edged from the glowering of one the other nudged his drawing board with an indignant elbow. There was no retreat, for the students were packed closely about him. The one behind him made disparaging remarks about the dimensions of his back, which seemed unkind, considering that he did not hesitate to use the back from time to time as an easel.

The air was hot and thick with charcoal dust. The crowded disorder confused him. He tried to think only of the cast. He began at the head, as was his custom, and felt a moment's exhilaration in studying the delicate shadows beneath the filleted curls.

He was aroused by sounds of derision from behind, and ominous prophecies of what "Old Velvet" would do to him when he caught sight of that pompadour. He observed then that the other men were not working at the head first, but mapping out the entire figure at once with long, raking, angular lines that blocked the shadows in square masses. He half rose and looked about. They were all working alike, with their drawing boards far out, and with blunt charcoal. He had spent half an hour sharpening his, and had hugged his drawing board.

He sat down again, impelled by protests from behind and drew the entire figure, but he could not bring himself to do it in those rude angles. He drew it with a single line—down the curving flank, about the gracious knees, skirting the feet, and up once more to round the farther shoulder that drooped above the nestling breast. Although he did not know it, this was a feat; the swing of the body was almost perfect, yet he had not skirmished a moment.

The youth behind him was now peering through spectacles above his shoulder.

"You're a queer duck!" he said; "but he'll make you do it his way. What do you mean by drawing like that?"

"Why?" asked Ewing, confused. "Let's see yours."

The other exhibited. There was no outline, there were no gracious curves, only a suggestion of angular shadows, scratched across with brutal straightness. Yet, when Ewing squinted his eyes a bit the thing stood out.

"Wait till I get my shadows in," he said.

"Cart before the horse!" rejoined the critic. "I see your finish with the old man."

Ewing started to lay in his shadows as the other had done, but it seemed as if that delicate body appealed for gentler treatment. He rubbed out the vandal lines and began swinging around the figure in the curving strokes habitual with him, strokes that nursed each lovely rondure like caresses. Then, until the closing hour, he polished, picking out the precious little reflected lights that saved her treasures from shadow.

"Red ruin for you, my boy!" exclaimed the spectacled one behind him. "Ravage and slaughter! Old Velvet will scalp you."Ewing stood up, released by his neighbors, who now rose in a clatter of toppled stools.

"What's the matter with it?" he asked.

"Finicky! You've fussed it to death. Velvet will slay you for those reflected lights alone—and your nice curly lines—oh, Lord!"

"But they're there, those lights," protested Ewing. "And it's the way I've always drawn. I suppose there are different methods."

"There's only one way with Velvet, and that's Velvet's way." Then with a damnatory waving-away of the offensive drawing he sauntered off to put his stuff in his locker.

Ewing dined alone that night. He was in no mood for Teevan.

Back in his place next day, still incredulous of defeat so swift, he waited for the master. He watched him going the rounds of the other students, the light playing on the purple velvet of the garment that gave him his title. His beard was a rich growth, his mustaches curled upward at the ends, his large, heavy eyelids drooped in a perpetual ennui. His usual criticism was a weary "Rub it out!"

When at last he stood beside Ewing's work he gave an effect of collapsing, as if his whole being cried out: "This is too much!" He took the drawing from the board and stuck it to the wall with two thumb tacks. Then, picking up a bit of charcoal, he wrote across it, "A perfect example of how not to do it."

He did not return to Ewing, but, after examining a few other drawings, he turned to leave the room. As he passed, Ewing reached across two neighbors—who protested—and caught the velvet jacket."Perhaps you can give me an idea," he said. The other looked at him as if he had not seen him before.

"Use intelligence! Good God—use intelligence!" he almost wailed, and made his escape.

Ewing mechanically placed a fresh sheet before him and began again, but he rubbed out as fast as he drew. The next morning he found the paper foul from many erasures, and started afresh. He could see now that his first drawing, posted in irredeemable ignominy, was not all that it should be. It lacked the freedom of work he had done in his solitude. He tried to conjure back that old free feeling, but the days passed and it drew farther away. Some of the students changed places and began on other casts. The better men went every other week into the life class. But Ewing stayed desperately by his crouching woman. He studied her until he loved and loathed her. The master came and went. Sometimes he ignored Ewing. When he did notice him it was always with a fresh blow on the sunk heart of the boy. Once he sat in his place and ran some of his own brusque, effective lines along the figure, the lines that every other youth in the room punctiliously imitated. They mingled with Ewing's strokes as a driving rain mingles with a bed of flowers.

"If you'd only give up your damned little way," he complained.

"I wish you'd explain a bit," pleaded the boy.

"Old Velvet" turned to the spectacled young man. "Give him your study. There, do it like that."

Then came the beginning of the end. He lost himself in a crawling blindness of imitation. The old power that had made him draw without knowing how he did it gathered its splendid garments and withdrew as mysteriously as it had once come to possess him. He drew, but he would no longer have recognized what he did as the work of his own hand. He thought of Griggs, who had said, "Style?—I'd know a scrap of your stuff if I found it in an ash barrel in Timbuctoo!"

The thought of those friendly men knowing his degradation was another stone on the grave of his self-esteem. It was this that made him wait when the others had gone one night, to take down that first crucified drawing from the wall where it had remained, torn and hanging by one tack.

"Will you give it to me?" said a voice, and, as he did not care one way or the other, the spectacled young man put it in his portfolio. Afterwards Ewing thought of asking him why he wanted it, but he did not come back again. He had been advanced to the life class.

The master did not speak to Ewing again. He made, at intervals as he passed, the pantomime of rubbing out. And Ewing obeyed, beginning each time the task that grew day by day more hatefully useless. In the beginning he had felt that if he could get that plaster woman off by himself he could draw her. The long habit of solitude had left him confounded by the crowd. There had been something almost shameful to him about drawing publicly, and he had the impulse to curl an arm about his sketch to hide it a little as he worked. He felt sick with the hot, dry air and the breathing of the stallful of men. When the door was opened the odor of turpentine came from the room where they were painting. It had for him a familiar, happy smell.

"I wish I could go in there," he said once to a fat youth beside him."That's what the dubs always say," was the reply. "It's so much easier to paint."

He spent a day going around, looking at the better students' work, asking them how they had learned to draw as "Old Velvet" wanted them to. They had a great many things to say that sounded technical, but he heard nothing that opened a way to him.

He hated the school; he hated the street that led to it, with a quiet ground swell of hatred. But, deepest of all, he hated his own despair. He felt that his shattered courage would never heal. He was like a dishonored soldier whose sword has been publicly broken. He remembered the fine things he had said to Teevan about his ambition, and the blush that suffused him ached. At the thought of Mrs. Laithe bringing him from his wild beast's hole, as if he had been worth her splendid faith, his heart withered within him. At intervals he started as if he suddenly awoke, saying to himself, "And to think it could have ended like this!"

At the end of a fortnight he sat for three days without doing anything, a stick of charcoal in his hand. He did not come again, and his fat neighbor used up his charcoal paper, after putting fine mustaches on all his crouching Venuses.

He had shunned his acquaintances during this time of travail. But twice had he seen Teevan since his first day at the League. He had tried to be cheerful at those meetings, still hoping the lines would come right, but he felt each time that Teevan saw straight to his wretched heart of doubt; and he would not risk another meeting until he could report an overwhelming victory—or defeat, if it must be so.

That he did not for a day forget his good friend, there was ample testimony; though this was of a nature that Teevan must remain oblivious to. On the night of the day that saw his first buffeting he walked the streets until late, rejoicing mournfully that there were still so many people who did not know his shame. Half unwittingly he wandered into Ninth Street, and stood a long time opposite Teevan's house, finding a solace in his friend's possible nearness. Then, as the days of defeat followed with so deadly a sequence, this walk and vigil became his nightly habit. Sometimes the house was darkened. Then he felt free to gaze at it. Sometimes there were lights, and his survey was brief and furtive. Until the very last there was always a bit of hope to spice the melancholy of this adventure: to-morrow the thing might be done as they all did it, the master be moved from blame to praise, and himself be free to enter this street bravely, noisily, careless of recognition, to tell how the big way had been opened. He had pictured the pleasure that would light Teevan's face as he heard this tale of conquest.