"Go slow, Fenton," interrupted Herman, "you know our poor wits are apt to be dazzled by too much brilliancy."
"The age," Fenton rattled on, "blooms once into a great man as an aloe into a crown of bloom."
"Right in there," broke in Rangely, who longed for a share in the conversation, "just consider how necessary it is that every art producer shall be in sympathy with the human life about him. That he should take the best wherever it is to be found. There's a miserable sentiment about shutting one's self up in some dark corner, and producing some tremendous thing. Don't you know how many New York and Boston artists have gone to Europe and hermetically sealed themselves up somewhere to ferment into greatness like a jug of cider turning into vinegar in a farmer's cellar?"
"That's what made Hunt such a big fellow," Herman interposed; "because he took the good wherever it offered."
"But that depends upon whether a man goes direct to Nature for inspiration," declared Fenton, "or sets himself to get a living by filching the good things his neighbors have won from her."
"Hunt did go to nature; that is just where he was great."
"I think," said Fred, laughingly, "that you will appreciate the mood in which I once wrote a preface. I planned a great metaphysical and philosophical work—I was a good deal younger than I am now—and the preface was to be, 'As to the originality of these ideas, I have nothing more to say than that I do not remember that they have ever been printed with my name on the title-page.' Of course, after that declaration, I felt at liberty to take any thing I wanted from any where; but, unluckily, my book never got beyond the preface."
"I'm glad you had the sense to stop there," declared Arthur. "I forgive the preface, but I could never have forgiven the book."
Helen rose from her seat at the piano and turned up the gas a little. The effect for which the light had been lowered was secured, and it was better, she recognized, to give to her singing a certain isolation, which must be done before the conversation became so general that the change from gloom to light would not be noticed.
She wore that evening a gray silk with black lace, a slight turning away showing the whiteness of her beautiful throat. Her jewels were cats'-eyes.