"I wonder if you've gotten that sky?" he began judicially, as the old man invited his comment. Sydenham looked up in some surprise, but Ewing's eyes were still on the sketch. "Too gray above, isn't it? I thought the gray was only down near the horizon. By the way, I wish I'd roughed in that cow for you. A cow isn't the easiest thing in the world to draw. They look easy, but they're not. That bit of stone wall isn't bad, and your clover effect is first rate." He paused. He had meant only to practice speaking his own mind against the next interview with Teevan. He did not want to hurt Sydenham. The latter was roping his stool and easel together. He had been a little amazed at his pupil's outburst, but he looked up with a smile entirely placid. "That's the way they all say it. You've caught the trick of art criticism, my boy, if you've caught nothing else." Ewing saw that he was laughed at. There was a cool little flash to his retort. "I can make that into a real cow for you, if you like, after we get home." But the old man only chuckled at him, making him regret that he had ever so little curbed his criticism. He had an impulse to fight, a craving to arouse resistance. But he saw that Sydenham was no target for him, save in a sort of subcaliber practice. He hoped this novel combativeness would not wither under the first glance of Teevan's sharp little eyes. It was dusk when they reached the city, and Ewing went to the Monastery to dine. He had long shunned the place, for the men there talked of things they had done or were doing, and they had made him, without meaning to, feel "out of it," as he told himself. For he, if he talked, could tell only of wonders he meant to do, and, lacking an audience composed of Teevans, he was shrewd enough to see that these would sound too wonderful and the future too distantly vague. He had always been glad, however, of his drawing on the east wall. They could not believe him wholly lacking after that, nor refuse him fellowship if he sought it. He avoided the crowd when he entered the room--the men he knew best were at a long table on the rear veranda just outside the open windows--and chose a small table opposite his drawing. He had thought of it often during the afternoon while he harangued Teevan in imagination. It had occurred to him that this was the only thing he had really done since coming to New York, and he had been seized with a longing to look at it again, to prove to his own eyes that the thing which was really his own--not Corot's nor Millet's nor even Sydenham's--was not an inconsiderable thing, not a thing he need despair of building on.