"'What will you do?'" He mimicked the other with a snarl. "Well, I begin by having him to dine. I study him, I win him. I have him now. He will dine with me other times. I'm not so sure he won't come to reverence me. Oh, it's an ideal situation! Damn it! How they fall! _We_ couldn't contrive them half so cunningly. The fool hath said in his heart 'There is no God'--a fool, indeed! There is a God, and He has a devil in Him, or He couldn't have given me this to play out. I have him, I tell you, her son and his son, think of it--her lover's son that they both loved--served up to me!" "What can you do with him?" "_Do_ with him?" The elder man eyed his son for a long minute, then dropped into a chair, and for an interval the young man pursued his rather uncomfortable reflections in silence. At last he broke this with another query. As there was no response, and his father's face was turned away, he rose and sauntered in front of him. The eyes met his musingly, and he saw that the mouth was fixed in a rather hideous smile. CHAPTER XVII AN ELUSIVE VENUS 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.