"What's the matter with it, then?" There was a silence. One or two men at neighbouring tables turned partly around to listen. There seemed to be something in the very simple and honest question of John Burleson that arrested the attention of every man at the Syrinx Club who had heard it. Because, for the first time, the question which every man there had silently, involuntarily asked himself had been uttered aloud at last by John Burleson--voiced in utter good faith and with all confidence that the answer could be only that there was nothing whatever the matter with Louis Neville's work. And his answer had been a universal silence. Clive Gail, lately admitted to the Academy said: "I have never in my life seen or believed possible such facility as is Louis Neville's." "Sure thing," grunted Burleson. "His personal manner of doing his work--which the critics and public term 'tek--nee--ee--eek,'" laughed Annan, "is simply gloriously bewildering. There is a sweeping splendour to it--and _what_ colour!" There ensued murmured and emphatic approbation; and another silence. Ogilvy's dark, pleasant face was troubled when he broke the quiet, and everybody turned toward him: "Then," he said, slowly, "what _is_ the matter with Neville?" Somebody said: "He _does_ convince you; it isn't that, is it?" A voice replied: "Does he convince himself?" "There is--there always has been something lacking in all that big, glorious, splendid work. It only needs that one thing--whatever it is," said Ogilvy, quietly. "Kelly is too sure, too powerfully perfect, too omniscient--" "And we mortals can't stand that," commented Annan, laughing. "'Raus mit Neville!' He paints joy and sorrow as though he'd never known either--" And his voice checked itself of its own instinct in the startled silence. "That man, Neville, has never known the pain of work," said Gail, deliberately. "When he has passed through it and it has made his hand less steady, less omnipotent--" "That's right. We can't love a man who has never endured what we have," said another. "No genius can hide his own immunity. That man paints with an unscarred soul. A little hell for his--and no living painter could stand beside him." "Piffle," observed John Burleson. Ogilvy said: "It is true, I think, that out of human suffering a quality is distilled which affects everything one does. Those who have known sorrow can best depict it--not perhaps most plausibly, but most convincingly--and with fewer accessories, more reticence, and--better taste." "Why do you want to paint tragedies?" demanded Burleson. "One need not paint them, John, but one needs to understand them to paint anything else--needs to have lived them, perhaps, to become a master of pictured happiness, physical or spiritual." "That's piffle, too!" said Burleson in his rumbling bass--"like that damn hen you lugged in--" A shout of laughter relieved everybody.