A time came when Maurice Price, suddenly finding himself in a new environment, remembered that in ten years he had not once painted a landscape from nature. As he stood in the wide doorway of his friend’s country studio, and gazed with delight at the springtime beauty of the New Hampshire hills flung down at his feet, the fact that during a whole decade his painting had been done within doors and under glass struck him as an absurdity, even a reproach. Ah, well, those who go about calling ten years a whole decade must expect reproach, he reasoned. They bring it on themselves. Besides, the situation was explicable enough. Ever since he and his wife had said good-bye to their cottage near Fontainebleau, exchanging the joys of study in France for the responsibilities of family life in their own land, his work had been chiefly portraits, with an occasional welcome mural decoration to break the monotony of rosy lips, shimmering pearls, crisp satins; of academic robes, frock coats, tennis trousers, and whatever else a modern portrait-painter must cope valiantly with, on canvas. Not that Maurice was weary of his good fortune in having portraits to do. He often said, with that frank yet pensive smile of his, that every sitter on earth has some personal quality which, if seen aright, can alleviate if not actually elevate our art. Hence, after every excursion into the field of mural decoration, he returned with new zest to his girls with pearls, his dowagers, his bankers; while after every surfeit of our common humanity as shown up in a north light, he seized with ardor the chance to depict on the walls of some library or court-house those various fables of antiquity which seem to shed the most pleasing light on the fables of our modern civilization. But never a landscape! Naturally, his decorations and even his portraits often had landscape backgrounds. Fancy our Agriculture without her wheatfields, or our Mining Industry without her tumbled hills, or a Bridal at Glen Cove without blue skies, lovely leafage, a beauty-haunted marble vase, a teasing vista where Pan might lurk unseen! But very properly, such backgrounds as these were merely arrangements, or, as one might say, apt quotations from nature; they did not pretend to report passionate personal interviews with her. Maurice Price loved to paint such backgrounds. Whether in a tranquil or a stormy mood, he always kept the hope of distilling beauty for the ages. And he knew that the backgrounds had their part in that enterprise of his.