"Bad logic," he commented. "We mount by experience, using our wrecked hopes as footholds." "You don't know how much a girl can endure. There comes a time-after years of steady descent--when misfortune and disappointment become endurable; when hope deferred no longer sickens. It is in rising toward better things that disappointments hurt most cruelly." He turned his head in surprise; then went on painting: "Your philosophy is the philosophy of submission." "Do you call a struggle of years, submission?" "But it was giving up after all--acquiescence, despondency, a _laissez faire_ policy." "One may tire of fighting." "One may. Another may not." "I think you have never had to fight very hard." He turned his head abruptly; after a moment's silent survey of her, he resumed his painting with a sharp, impersonal glance before every swift and decisive brush stroke: "No; I have never had to fight, Miss West.... It was keen of you to recognise it. I have never had to fight at all. Things come easily to me--things have a habit of coming my way.... I suppose I'm not exactly the man to lecture anybody on the art of fighting fortune. She's always been decent to me.... Sometimes I'm afraid--I have an instinct that she's too friendly.... And it troubles me. Do you understand what I mean?" "Yes." He looked up at her: "Are you sure?" "I think so. I have been watching you painting. I never imagined anybody could draw so swiftly, so easily--paint so surely, so accurately--that every brush stroke could be so--so significant, so decisive.... Is it not unusual? And is not that what is called facility?" "Lord in Heaven!" he said; "what kind of a girl am I dealing with?--or what kind of a girl is dealing so unmercifully with me?" "I--I didn't mean--" "Yes, you did. Those very lovely and wonderfully shaped eyes of yours are not entirely for ornament. Inside that pretty head there's an apparatus designed for thinking; and it isn't idle." He laughed gaily, a trifle defiantly: "You've said it. You've found the fly in the amber. I'm cursed with facility. Worse still it gives me keenest pleasure to employ it. It does scare me occasionally--has for years--makes me miserable at intervals--fills me full of all kinds of fears and doubts." He turned toward her, standing on his ladder, the big palette curving up over his left shoulder, a wet brush extended in his right hand: "What shall I do!" he exclaimed so earnestly that she sat up straight, startled, forgetting her pose. "Ought I to stifle the vigour, the energy, the restless desire that drives me to express myself--that will not tolerate the inertia of calculation and ponderous reflection? Ought I to check myself, consider, worry, entangle myself in psychologies, seek for subtleties where none exist--split hairs, relapse into introspective philosophy when my fingers itch for a lump of charcoal and every colour on my set palette yells at me to be about my business?"