She thought about that a minute. "N--o, Karl; I think not. It seems to me she must be open to it in every way to make it stand for life, in the sense I want it to." "Perhaps," he said, his voice drooping a little. And then, abruptly: "Have you done any of that?" "Oh, just some little sketches." "Show me the little sketches," he begged. "I want to see them all." "Oh, but Karl, they wouldn't convey the idea at all. Wait until it is farther along." "No, please show them this morning,"--softly, persuasively. She was puzzled, and reluctant, but she got them out, and with them other things to show him. He asked many questions. In the sketches she was going to develop he would know just how she was going to elaborate them. He asked her to tell just how they would look when worked out. "I'm a sick boy home from school," he said, "and I must be amused." And then he looked at her finished pictures; she protested against the intentness with which he looked at some of them, insisting they were not worth the strain she could see it was on his eyes. "It's queer about finished pictures," she laughed; "they're not half so great and satisfying as the pictures you are going to do next." It went through her with a sharp pain to see Karl hurting his eyes as she knew he was hurting them. She could not understand his insistence; it was not like him to be so unreasonable. And he looked so terribly--so worn and ill; if only he would go to bed and let her take care of him! But he seemed intent on knowing all there was to know about the pictures. A strange whim for him to cling to this way! As he looked he wanted her to talk about them--tell just what this and that meant, insisting upon getting the full significance of it all. He had never before appreciated her firm grasp. Her work in these different stages of evolution gave him a clearer idea of how much she had worked and studied, how seriously and intelligently she had set out for the mastery of her craft. He had always known that the poetic impulses were there, the desire to express, the ideas, the delight in colour, but he saw now the other things; this was letting him into the workman's side of her work. He spoke of that, and she laughed. "Yes, this is what they don't see. This is what they never know. Poetic impulses don't paint pictures, Karl. That's the incentive; the thing that keeps one at it, but you can't do it without these tricks of the trade which mean just downright work. I've never worked on a picture yet in which I wasn't almost fatally handicapped by this thing of not knowing enough. The bigger your idea, the more skill, cunning, fairly, you must have to force it into life." She told him at last that they were through. They had even looked at rude little sketches she had made of places they had cared for in Europe. Indeed he looked very long at some of those little sketches of places they had loved.