Sam Grainger had considered that he did not belong. "I'm a performer," he said once, "so I may get well-to-do some day; and a performer, as of course you've noticed, Red-Top, can be an awful nice guy, _but_ ... but God damn it, I can't compose, and I have a most un-American impulse to get down and lick the boots of anyone who can." She remembered saying: "Why, you're creative." Sam had just grunted, inarticulately annoyed. In those days Edith had not been fully aware of the dismal condition rapidly overtaking that once honorable word, and Sam had been surprisingly insensitive to words and the rich changeable life of words, as if he could hear only one kind of music, or believed other kinds irrelevant. Nowadays Edith's skin crawled when the corpse of the word "creative" was being kicked around. It gave off a squashy noise; was almost as offensively decayed as the corpse of "heritage." Today everything's creative, including beauty culture, business letters, and the application of new superlatives to old laxatives. There was, Edith had heard, an operation known as "creative selling." We wait perhaps, she thought, for the day when the market will offer a creative toilet as an aid to positive thinking. Reluctant, not quite frightened, Edith returned to the drawing table and looked down at twelve pen-and-ink faces. They returned the gaze, with intensity, with the force, savor, complexity of an authentic life that no exploration could ever exhaust. _But--my hand--My hand?_ Certainly no other. Technique of course; that much, after long effort of years, Edith could take for granted. But this--wasn't it beyond technique? For the first time that evening--it had been nowhere near her while she was deep in work--Edith recalled Daumier's "The Jury." She took down the volume of his work, not trusting memory. After the comparison she could say _No_: a round, unworried, satisfying _No_. This curious thing of her own, this hating-fearing-loving-pitying distillation of the jury in _People vs. Blake_, owed no more to Daumier (or to Callista) than any work should honestly owe to whatever the artist has encountered in the past. Conception, development, fulfillment--unmistakably a Nolan original. Perhaps the first.