"It's the one thing I miss in his pictures, because it's the one thing I most admire--strength, virility." She was talking more rapidly as her enthusiasm gathered headway. "A man's pictures are, in a way, portraits of his nature. He can't paint strong things unless he is strong himself." Saxon felt his heart leap. It was something to know that she believed his canvases reflected a quality of strength inherent to himself. "You and your master," she went on, "are unlike in everything except your style. Can you fancy yourself hiding away from the world because you couldn't face the music of your own fame? That's not modesty--it's insanity. When I was in Paris, everybody was raving about some new pictures from his brush, but only his agent knew where he actually was, or where he had been for years." "For the man," he acceded, "I have as small respect as you can have, but for the work I have something like worship! I began trying to paint, and I was groping--groping rather blindly after something--I didn't know just what. Then, one day, I stood before his 'Winter Sunset.' You know the picture?" She nodded assent. "Well, when I saw it, I wanted to go out to the Metropolitan entrance, and shout Eureka up and down Fifth Avenue. It told me what I'd been reaching through the darkness of my novitiate to grasp. It seemed to me that art had been revealed to me. Somehow," the man added, his voice falling suddenly from its enthused pitch to a dead, low one, "everything that comes to me seems to come by revelation!" Into Duska's eyes came quick light of sympathy. He had halted before her, and now she arose impulsively, and laid a light hand for a moment on his arm. "I understand," she agreed. "I think that for most artists to come as close as you have come would be triumph enough, but you--" she looked at him a moment with a warmth of confidence--"you can do a great deal more." So ended her first lesson in the independence of art, leaving the pupil's heart beating more quickly than at its commencement.