"Just so! Your man's art is broader, perhaps stronger. That difference is not merely one of feeling: it is more. The American's style was the outgrowth of the bigness of your vast spaces--of the broad spirit of your great country--of the pride that comes to a man in the consciousness of physical power and currents of red blood! Marston was the creature of a confined life, bounded by walls. He was self-absorbed, morbid, anemic. To be the perfect artist, he needed only to be the perfect animal! He did not understand that. He disliked physical effort. He felt that something eluded him, and he fought for it with brush and mahlstick. He should have used the Alpinstock or the snow-shoe." Hautecoeur was talking with an enthused fervor that swept him into metaphor. "Yet--" Steele was secretly sounding his way toward the end he sought--"yet, the latter pictures of Marston have that same quality." "Precisely. I would in a moment more have spoken of that. I have my theory. Since leaving Paris, I believe Marston has gone perhaps into the Alps, perhaps into other countries, and built into himself the thing we urged upon him--the robust vision." The girl spoke for the first time, putting, after the fashion of the uninitiated, the question which, the more learned hesitate to propound: "What is this thing you call the secret? What is it that makes the difference?" "Ah, mademoiselle, if I knew that!" The instructor sighed as he smiled. "How says the English Fitzgerald? 'A hair perhaps divides the false and true.' Had Marston had the making of the famous epigram, he would not have said he mixed his paints with brains. Rather would he have confessed, he mixed them with ideals." "But I fear we delay the posing," suggested Steele, moving, with sudden apprehension, toward the door. "I assure you, no!" prevaricated the teacher, with instant readiness. "It is a wearying pose. The model will require a longer rest than the usual. Will not mademoiselle permit me to show her those Marston canvases we are fortunate enough to have here? Perhaps, she will then understand why I find it impossible to answer her question." * * * * *