"Yours is the discovery," I said. "Yours shall be the glory. Fame shall crown you; and perhaps if there remains any reflected light in the form of a by-product, some modest and negligible little ray may chance to illuminate me." Surprised and deeply moved by my eloquence, I bent over her hand and saluted it with my lips. She thanked me. Her pretty face was rosy. It appeared that she had three cows to milk, new-laid eggs to gather, and the construction of some fresh butter to be accomplished. At the bars of the grassy pasture slope she dropped me a curtsey, declining very shyly to let me carry her lacteal paraphernalia. So I continued on to the bungalow garden, where Blythe sat on a camp stool under a green umbrella, painting a picture of something or other. "Mr. Blythe!" I cried, striving to subdue my enthusiasm. "The eyes of the scientific world are now open upon this house! The searchlight of Fame is about to be turned upon you--" "I prefer privacy," he interrupted. "That's why I came here. I'll be obliged if you'll turn off that searchlight." "But, my dear Mr. Blythe--" "I want to be let alone," he repeated irritably. "I came out here to paint and to enjoy privately my own paintings." If what stood on his easel was a sample of his pictures, nobody was likely to share his enjoyment. "Your work," said I, politely, "is--is----" "Is what!" he snapped. "_What_ is it--if you think you know?" "It is entirely, so to speak, _per se_--by itself--" "What the devil do you mean by that?" I looked at his picture, appalled. The entire canvas was one monotonous vermillion conflagration. I examined it with my head on one side, then on the other side; I made a funnel with both hands and peered intently through it at the picture. A menacing murmuring sound came from him. "Satisfying--exquisitely satisfying," I concluded. "I have often seen such sunsets--" "What!" "I mean such prairie fires--" "Damnation!" he exclaimed. "I'm painting a bowl of nasturtiums!" "I was speaking purely in metaphor," said I with a sickly smile. "To me a nasturtium by the river brink is more than a simple flower. It is a broader, grander, more magnificent, more stupendous symbol. It may mean anything, everything--such as sunsets and conflagrations and Goetterdaemmerungs! Or--" and my voice was subtly modulated to an appealing and persuasive softness--"it may mean nothing at all--chaos, void, vacuum, negation, the exquisite annihilation of what has never even existed." He glared at me over his shoulder. If he was infected by Cubist tendencies he evidently had not understood what I said. "If you won't talk about my pictures I don't mind your investigating this district," he grunted, dabbing at his palette and plastering a wad of vermilion upon his canvas; "but I object to any public invasion of my artistic privacy until I am ready for it." "When will that be?" He pointed with one vermilion-soaked brush toward a long, low, log building.