In his golden twenties, he had been a singularly diligent lover and student of landscape. Many an elder painter might have envied him his portfolios stuffed with first-hand information and first-hand illusion concerning rocks and seas, skies and fields, trees and hills, and all the rainbow hues and lights and darks that visited them in their repose, their shifting moods, their crises. Maurice in the late thirties often stood in awe of that far-off Maurice of the early twenties, who seemed to know so much even then of the painter’s magic book of all outdoors. To-day, he wondered whether he could beat his younger self in the game that is played on canvas with brushes, under the sky, with everything more or less astir, and nothing at all ever quite the same as it was a moment before, least of all in its colors and values. After that devastating influenza of March, his seldom-needed doctor had ordered a few weeks’ complete rest. “Complete piffle,” Price had growled. Nevertheless, when his friend James Anthony, a painter given to unexpected withdrawals and fresh beginnings in art, had offered him an opportunity for an entire change of scene, he had accepted. Anthony, always as keen as any Vibert or Abendroth in his pursuit of the secrets of the old masters, had suddenly decided to go abroad to study certain gums and resins that might eventually preserve our American painting from destruction. Anthony was like that. He was successful enough and wealthy enough to be as whimsically conscientious as he pleased about pigments and surfaces. He could afford to keep a bee in his hat, and call it altruism. And now, the bee having stung him afresh, that wonderful hill studio of his was at Maurice’s disposal. “You will be doing me a favor,” wrote Jimmy Anthony, “if you’ll take it, even for this one summer. There are two sculptors hounding me to rent it to them, a man and a woman. The man I can beat off, but the woman will work her will and get the place and wreck it for me, if you don’t come to the rescue. I can stand a painter’s rubbish, but sculptors! No, no, not for Jimmy. And please use up whatever you find in the line of materials. There’s nothing there of any further interest to me. You might like all that garance rose doré, and that pomegranate cadmium I used to swear by. And those mahogany panels that I had especially made. Do use them. Good on both sides, and bully for landscapes.”