He passed the flat tip of his wet brush through the mass of rags in his left hand with a graceful motion like one unsheathing a sword: "I tell you I do the things which I do, as easily, as naturally, as happily as any fool of a dicky-bird does his infernal twittering on an April morning. God knows whether there's anything in my work or in his twitter; but neither he nor I are likely to improve our output by pondering and cogitation.... Please resume the pose." She did so, her dark young eyes on him; and he continued painting and talking in his clear, rapid, decisive manner: "My name is Louis Neville. They call me Kelly--my friends do," he added, laughing. "Have you ever seen any of my work?" "Yes." He laughed again: "That's more soothing. However, I suppose you saw that big canvas of mine for the ceiling of the Metropolitan Museum's new northwest wing. The entire town saw it." "Yes, I saw it." "Did you care for it?" She had cared for it too intensely to give him any adequate answer. Never before had her sense of colour and form and beauty been so exquisitely satisfied by the painted magic of any living painter. So this was the man who had enveloped her, swayed her senses, whirled her upward into his ocean of limpid light! This was the man who had done that miracle before which, all day long, crowds of the sober, decent, unimaginative--the solid, essentials of the nation--had lingered fascinated! This was the man--across there on a stepladder. And he was evidently not yet thirty; and his name was Neville and his friends called him Kelly. "Yes," she said, diffidently, "I cared for it." "Really?" He caught her eye, laughed, and went on with his work. "The critics were savage," he said. "Lord! It hurts, too. But I've simply got to be busy. What good would it do me to sit down and draw casts with a thin, needle-pointed stick of hard charcoal. Not that they say I can't draw. They admit that I can. They admit that I can paint, too." He laughed, stretched his arms: "Draw! A blank canvas sets me mad. When I look at one I feel like covering it with a thousand figures twisted into every intricacy and difficulty of foreshortening! I wish I were like that Hindu god with a dozen arms; and even then I couldn't paint fast enough to satisfy what my eyes and brain have already evoked upon an untouched canvas.... It's a sort of intoxication that gets hold of me; I'm perfectly cool, too, which seems a paradox but isn't. And all the while, inside me, is a constant, hushed kind of laughter, bubbling, which accompanies every brush stroke with an 'I told you so!'--if you know what I'm trying to say--_do_ you?" "N-not exactly. But I suppose you mean that you are self-confident." "Lord! Listen to this girl say in a dozen words what I'm trying to say in a volume so that it won't scare me! Yes! That's it. I am confident. And it's that self-confidence which sometimes scares me half to death."