"Lecture me!" His face mirrored alarm. "Do it now--then, I sha'n't have it impending to terrorize better acquaintance." She gazed away for a time, her eyes clouding with doubt. At last, she laughed. "It makes me seem foolish," she confessed, "because you know so much more than I do about the subject of this lecture--only," she added with conviction, "the little I know is right, and the great deal you know may be wrong." "I plead guilty, and throw myself on the mercy of the court." He made the declaration in a tone of extreme abjectness. "But I don't want you to plead guilty. I want you to reform." Not knowing the nature of the reform required, Saxon remained discreetly speechless. "You are the first disciple of Frederick Marston," she said, going to the point without preliminaries. "You don't have to be anybody's disciple. I don't know a great deal about art, but I've stood before Marston's pictures in the galleries abroad and in this country. I love them. I've seen your pictures, too, and you don't have to play tag with Frederick Marston." For a moment, Saxon sat twisting his pipe in his fingers. His silence might almost have been an ungracious refusal to discuss the matter. "Oh, I know it's sacrilege," she said, leaning forward eagerly, her eyes deep in their sincerity, "but it's true." The man rose and paced back and forth for a moment, then halted before her. When he spoke, it was with a ring like fanaticism in his voice. "There is no Art but Art, and Marston is her prophet. That is my Koran of the palette." For a while, she said nothing, but shook her head with a dissenting smile, which carried up the corners of her lips in maddeningly delicious fashion. Then, the man went on, speaking now slowly and in measured syllables: "Some day--when I can tell you my whole story--you will know what Marston means to me. What little I have done, I have done in stumbling after him. If I ever attain his perfection, I shall still be as you say only the copyist--yet, I sometimes think I would rather be the true copyist of Marston than the originator of any other school." She sat listening, the toe of one small foot tapping the floor below the short skirt of her gown, her brow delightfully puckered with seriousness. A shaft of sun struck the delicate color of her cheeks, and discovered coppery glints in her brown hair. She was very slim and wonderful, Saxon thought, and out beyond the vines the summer seemed to set the world for her, like a stage. The birds with tuneful delirium provided the orchestration. "I know just how great he is," she conceded warmly; "I know how wonderfully he paints. He is a poet with a brush for a pen. But there's one thing he lacks--and that is a thing you have." The man raised his brows in challenged astonishment.