Then she considered the special qualities in a slightly different way, with a sharpening of critical judgment, summoning to her aid the knowledge and discernment she had acquired as a fiction editor on a magazine group which was always on the lookout for exceptional illustrations and preferred not to leave the discovery and selection of such material to the art department alone. There were twelve drawings in the portfolio and she spent two or three minutes studying each of them and when she had completed her scrutiny she went back, and made a re-appraisal without saying a word. She was aware of his eyes upon her and an anxiety emanating from him that a word or two might have eased. But somehow she could not meet his gaze or bring herself to gloss over the truth or distort it in any way out of sympathy for him, or simply to spare him pain. He wasn't the kind of young man she could lie to without seriously impairing her own integrity and self-respect. Had she attempted to lie, she was quite sure that he would not have been deceived. What could she say to him, how soften the blow without cutting him to the quick? Would it do any good at all to tell him the simple truth ... that these drawings had about them a quality of pure enchantment, of greatness, undoubtedly, a delicacy of perception that made her want to weep? How could she tell him that they were the kind of drawings which no magazine could possibly accept? It wasn't just a question of their being too good. The line between the best commercial art and the canvasses of a Van Gogh wasn't quite that hard and fast. It could be broken down, dissolved away, if a drawing was powerful enough. But these drawings were too tenuous in a fanciful way, too remote from--well, even the kind of reality that surrealism specialized in--the fragmentary, broken up, subconscious dream imagery that managed to remain sharply delineated, with many bold and contrasting scenic effects ... broken columns against a blood-red sky, an ancient castle crumbling into ruins, a giant's hand clasping an egg. These drawings suggested more a Midsummer Night's Dream seen through the spray of a Watteau fountain in an Alice-in-Wonderland kind of topsy-turvydom. There were no bold contrasts at all, no clearly-defined human figures, no dramatic, story-telling content. Everything seemed to float and quiver, to be suspended in the air, or to recede into rainbow-hued distances. It was a blue world of enchantment and wonder, bathed in the light that never was on sea or land. But it was not a real world that dealt with the human condition on any level. A sensitive hand had worked with the pigments and hues of Merlin's realm of magic, avoiding the abstract and the symbolical but producing something just as provocatively illusive on an entirely different plane. She tried to visualize just one of them--the least tenuous, the only one that held the faintest ray of hope--on the cover of a magazine.