Preciosa gave Prochnow his letter in front of the Parthenon pediment (where the current of visitors was thinnest), and counselled him to advance on the Grindstone. He was as quick and clever as any of them, she declared, and was entitled to take his share. Prochnow tossed his head. "I don't know that I care for a 'share,'" he said. "Do you want to do it all?" asked Preciosa, awe-struck. "All or none," replied Prochnow loftily. "I am not one to co-operate. I could do the whole as easily as a part." They strolled on through one spacious hall after another; none seemed too roomy for the manoeuvres of this young genius. The largest studio in the Burrow, Gowan's own, cramped him--most of all on the days when Mrs. Gowan came down, set forth the tea-pot, lit up her candles and gave her moving little imitation of the handsomer functions that took place through the upper tiers of the Temple of Art. Prochnow had scant patience with the mild hospitalities that accompanied, obbligato-like, art's onward course; he could not accommodate himself, he could not fit in. There were days when the streets and the parks themselves seemed none too spacious, and Preciosa, who was beginning to accompany him abroad, soon got the widest notion of his limitless expansiveness. He saw things with an eye that was new, informed, penetrating, and he spread comments acute, critical, pungent, with the freest possible tongue. He showed her the tawdry, restless vulgarity of the architecture along the most splendid of her favourite thoroughfares, and the ludicrousness of much of the sculpture that cumbered the public parks; and with the mercilessness of youth for mediocrity in his seniors, the _arrives,_ he would run through the canvases of current exhibitions, displaying an abrupt arrogance, a bald, raw, cursory cruelty that only the Uebermensch of art would have ventured to employ. "And what do you think of our front parlour furniture?" asked Preciosa; "and of all that fancy woodwork on our cupola?" Prochnow placed his hand over his mouth and turned away. It seemed as if these things were too awful for characterization, yet he would spare them for her sake. Let him laugh, though, if he wished; and she would laugh with him. Thus her world daily became smaller, more insignificant, less to be regarded, while Ignace himself grew bigger, more preponderant. How could she refuse confidence in one who had such boundless confidence in himself?