The master did not speak to Ewing again. He made, at intervals as he passed, the pantomime of rubbing out. And Ewing obeyed, beginning each time the task that grew day by day more hatefully useless. In the beginning he had felt that if he could get that plaster woman off by himself he could draw her. The long habit of solitude had left him confounded by the crowd. There had been something almost shameful to him about drawing publicly, and he had the impulse to curl an arm about his sketch to hide it a little as he worked. He felt sick with the hot, dry air and the breathing of the stallful of men. When the door was opened the odor of turpentine came from the room where they were painting. It had for him a familiar, happy smell. "I wish I could go in there," he said once to a fat youth beside him. "That's what the dubs always say," was the reply. "It's so much easier to paint." He spent a day going around, looking at the better students' work, asking them how they had learned to draw as "Old Velvet" wanted them to. They had a great many things to say that sounded technical, but he heard nothing that opened a way to him. He hated the school; he hated the street that led to it, with a quiet ground swell of hatred. But, deepest of all, he hated his own despair. He felt that his shattered courage would never heal. He was like a dishonored soldier whose sword has been publicly broken. He remembered the fine things he had said to Teevan about his ambition, and the blush that suffused him ached. At the thought of Mrs. Laithe bringing him from his wild beast's hole, as if he had been worth her splendid faith, his heart withered within him. At intervals he started as if he suddenly awoke, saying to himself, "And to think it could have ended like this!" At the end of a fortnight he sat for three days without doing anything, a stick of charcoal in his hand. He did not come again, and his fat neighbor used up his charcoal paper, after putting fine mustaches on all his crouching Venuses. He had shunned his acquaintances during this time of travail. But twice had he seen Teevan since his first day at the League. He had tried to be cheerful at those meetings, still hoping the lines would come right, but he felt each time that Teevan saw straight to his wretched heart of doubt; and he would not risk another meeting until he could report an overwhelming victory--or defeat, if it must be so.