She knew the artist's eyes were upon her in appeal for praise. She drew in her under lip and narrowed her eyes as one in the throes of critical deliberation. "Yes, I should recognize the spot at once," she dared to say at last. "How well you've drawn the rock." "I hoped you'd like it. I don't mind telling you I put in a lot of time on that thing. I 'carried it along' as my father used to say. I don't believe I could better that. And here are some others." He displayed them without further urging, his shyness vanished by his enthusiasm, in his eye a patent confusion of pride and anxiety. She found them in quality like the first. In one the valley of the Wimmenuche from the east bench was as precisely definite as a topographical map; in another the low-lying range of hills to the south had lost all their gracious and dignifying haze. "They are immensely interesting," observed his critic with animation, "It may be"--she searched for a tempering phrase--"it is just possible there's a trick of color you need to learn yet. You know color is so difficult to convict. It's shifty, evasive, impalpable. I dare say that lake isn't as flatly blue as you've painted it, nor that cliff as flatly pink in sunlight. And those hills--isn't there a mistiness that softens their lines and gives one a sense of their distance? Color is _so_ difficult--_so_ tricky!" She had spoken rapidly, her eyes keeping to the poor things before her. Now she ventured a glance at the painter and met a puzzled seriousness in his look. "You may be right," he assented at last. "Sometimes I've felt I was on the wrong track. I see what you mean. You mean you could reach over a mile and pick up the ranch house at Bar-7--that it's like a little painted doll's house; and you mean you could push your finger into those hills, though they're meant to be a hundred miles away. Well, it serves me right, I guess. My father warned me about color. And I never saw any good pictures but his, and that was years ago. I've forgotten how they ought to look. He sold all his when I was young--all but one." "You've done well, considering that." "He said I must learn to draw first--really to draw--and he taught me to do that. I _can_ draw. But black and white is so dingy, and these colors are always nagging you, daring you to try them. If I could only learn to get real air between me and those hills. I wonder, now, if my colors seem like those Navajo blankets to you." He flung himself away from the canvases like an offended horse. "Let me see your black-and-whites," she suggested hastily. "Oh, those! They don't amount to much, but I'll show you." He thrust aside the canvases and opened a portfolio on the chair.