"He won't go into a competition. He says it's beneath an artist's dignity." "Damned nonsense!" blustered Irons, sitting up in his chair in excitement over such an extraordinary proposition. "Don't we all go into competitions whenever we send in sealed proposals? Beneath his dignity! Great Scott! The cockiness of artists is enough to take away a man's breath." Mr. Hubbard, who was a lawyer chiefly occupied, as far as business went, in managing his own large property and certain trust funds, and Mr. Calvin, who had never in his life soiled his aristocratic hands with any business whatever, smiled in the mutual consciousness that "sealed proposals" were as much outside their experience as competitions were foreign to that of Grant Herman. The thought, passing and trivial as it was, moved their sympathy a little toward the sculptor's view of the matter, although since secretly Mr. Calvin was determined that the commission should be given to Orin Stanton, the fact made little difference. "You evidently don't want to undergo the general condemnation that has fallen on whoever has had a share in the Boston statues thus far," Mr. Calvin observed, glancing at Irons with a genial smile. "If you are going to set yourself to hit the popular taste and keep yourself clear of the claws of the critics at the same time, I fear you've a heavy task laid out." "The critics always pitch into everything," Irons responded with a growl. "It's the taste of the people I want to please. I believe in art as a popular educator, and people can't be educated by things they won't look at." "Oh, as to that," Stewart Hubbard rejoined, with a twinkle in his eye, "conventionality is after all the consensus of the taste of mankind." Peter Calvin was at a loss to tell whether his friend was in earnest or was only quizzing Irons, so he contented himself with an appreciative look, and a smile of dazzling warmth. Irons, on the other hand, looked toward the speaker with suspicion. "I haven't much sympathy with a good deal of the stuff artists talk," he continued, following his own train of thought. "It doesn't square very well with common sense and ain't much more than pure gassing, I think. The truth is, genius is mostly moonshine. The man I call a genius is the one that makes things work practically." "In other words," said Calvin, spurred to emulate Hubbard's epigram, and involuntarily glancing toward the latter for approval, "you think a genius is a man who is able to harness Pegasus to the plough, and make him work without kicking things to pieces." "That's about it," Irons assented; "and I think Herman is too toploftical and full of cranky theories. They say Mrs. Greyson has hit the nail exactly on the head in that statue she showed in Paris last year. That pleased the critics and the public both, and that's exactly what we are after. I think we ought to ask her to make a design."