These boys have, perhaps, an aunt in Kansas City, or a mother in Lynn, Massachusetts, who is saving and pinching to send them fifteen or twenty dollars a week so that they can learn to be great painters, and they have not been in Paris a week before they have changed their entire view of art, and adopted a new method and a new master and a new religion. It is nowise derogatory to a boy to be supported by a fond aunt in Kansas City, who sends him fifteen dollars a week and the news of the social life of that place, but it is amusing to think how she and his cousins in the West would be awed if they heard him damn a picture by waving his thumb in the air at it, and saying, "It has a little too much of that," with a downward sweep of the thumb, "and not enough of this," with an upward sweep. For one hardly expects a youth who is still at Julien's, and who has not yet paid the first quarter's rent for his studio, to proclaim all the first painters of France as only fit to color photographs. It is as if some one were to say, "You can take away all of the books of the Boston Library and nothing will be lost, but spare three volumes of sonnets written by the only great writer of the present time, who is a friend of mine, and of whom no one knows but myself." Of course one must admire loyalty of that sort, for when it is loyalty to an idea it cannot help but be fine and sometimes noble, though it is a trifle amusing as well. It is just this tenacity of belief in one's own work, and just this intolerance of the work of others, that make Paris inspiring. A man cannot help but be in earnest, if he amounts to anything at all, when on every side he hears his work attacked or vaunted to the skies. As long as the question asked is "Is it art?" and not "Will it sell?" and "Is it popular?" the influence must be for good. These students, in their loyalty to the particular school they admire, of course proclaim their belief in every public and private place, and are ever on their guard, but it is in their studios that they have set up their gods and established their doctrines most firmly. One of these young men, whom I had known at college, took me to his studio last summer, and asked me to tell him how I liked it. It was a most embarrassing question to me, for to my untrained eye the rooms seemed to be stricken with poverty, and so bare as to appear untenanted. I said, at last, that he had a very fine view from his windows. "Yes, but you say nothing of the room itself," he protested; "and I have spent so much time and thought on it. I have been a year and a half in arranging this room." "But there is nothing in it," I objected; "you couldn't have taken a year and a half to arrange these things. There is not enough of them. It shouldn't have taken more than half an hour."