"I wonder if it is," he said, slowly, leaning forward and curving his hands about his eyes so as to shut off everything from his view except the canvas. "I wonder if it is!" he repeated. Then his hands dropped sadly in his lap, and he sank back again with a patient kind of revulsion. "No, no, it isn't! I always think they're good when I've just finished them. I've been fooled that way all my life. They don't look the same afterwards."
"They're always beautiful," she said, softly.
"Ah, ah!" he sighed.
"Now, Roger!" she cried, with cheerful sharpness, continuing her work.
"I know," he said, with a plaintive laugh,—"I know. Sometimes I think that all my reward has been in the few minutes I've had just after finishing them. During those few minutes I seem to see in them all that I wanted to put in them; I see it because what I've been trying to express is still so warm in my own eyes that I seem to have got it on the canvas where I wanted it."
"But you do," she said. "You do get it there."
"No," he murmured, in return. "I never did. I got out some of the old ones when I came in this morning, some that I hadn't looked at for years, and it's the same with them. You can do it much better yourself—your sketches show it."
"No, no!" she protested, quickly.
"Yes, they do; and I wondered if it was only because you were young. But those I did when I was young are almost the same as the ones I paint now. I haven't learned much. There hasn't been any one to show me! And you can't learn from print, never! Yet I've grown in what I SEE—grown so that the world is full of beauty to me that I never dreamed of seeing when I began. But I can't paint it—I can't get it on the canvas. Ah, I think I might have known how to, if I hadn't had to teach myself, if I could only have seen how some of the other fellows did their work. If I'd ever saved money to get away from Canaan—if I could have gone away from it and come back knowing how to paint it—if I could have got to Paris for just one month! PARIS—for just one month!"
"Perhaps we will; you can't tell what MAY happen." It was always her reply to this cry of his.