Mrs. Doring looked up with a start. “Tell me about them,” she said. “Ever since I can remember they have been with me, and are my true life,” he said. “They exist in the shape of simple rustic scenes, old-time well-sweeps, tumble-down stone-houses and walls and things of that sort, with people in them who are a part of their history. They come into my mind and insist upon being painted. They are not satisfied to be put in black and white. That is crucifixion for them and for me, too. They beg, entreat and command me to put them in color. “This girl at the old-time fountain in this drawing is one of them. That’s the reason the picture isn’t hard and lifeless like most of the truck I bring in here. The blunder of putting her feet on wrong occurred, because I drew the feet last, and about that time she found out that she wasn’t being painted, but was to be a sacrifice to the terrible monster of newspaper illustration, which is an easy way to please children and uneducated people, and an offence to those of a higher order of intelligence. In rage at the use I was going to make of her she jumped up and down so fast that her feet got tangled in my mind. I saw her, you understand. She was real--I saw her--not in flesh and blood, but imagination, which to me is a kind of higher reality.” Astonished and delighted to find one worker with ideals above mere keeping afloat, Cartice asked him if he worked on his ideals or merely dreamed of them. “I reach after them all I can,” he said, “handicapped as I am. I give my heart to them, though I haven’t been able to give them much of my time. But I have not kicked them out of my way, or murdered them to sell their flesh at the nearest market, as many of my associates have done. Nor have I given up the belief that, if we work on our ideals, devote ourselves to them, in the face of every obstacle, we shall be lifted out of the dreadful mire of the commonplace, where the feet of most of us stick fast all our lives. But they will have no half-hearted devotion. They want whole-souled service only, and they are right. Willing to give us all of themselves it is only fair they should ask all from us. “I have worked but little in oil, and am almost entirely uninstructed, yet these pictures form, whenever I take up a brush; and it isn’t putting it too strong to say that they beg to be painted. They come in color exactly as they want to be put on canvas,--not simply in my mind, but before my eyes, though thin and shadowy. “One Sunday when rambling in the country I passed an old well, and said to myself, ‘I’ll paint that.’ Instantly I saw a man lying by the well, though no man was there. I painted it that way and put it up in the den I call my studio.