After a moment, he demanded brazenly:
“Would you mind telling me which colt won that first race?”
CHAPTER II
“His career has been pretty much a march of successive triumphs through the world of art, and he has left the critics only one peg on which to hang their carping.”
Steele spoke with the warmth of enthusiasm. He had succeeded in capturing Duska for a few minutes of monopoly in the semi-solitude of the verandah at the back of the club-house. Though he had a hopeless cause of his own to plead, it was characteristic of him that his first opportunity should go to the praise of his friend.
“What is that?” The girl found herself unaccountably interested and ready to assume this stranger’s defense even before she knew with what his critics charged him.
“That he is a copyist,” explained the man; “that he is so enamored of the style of Frederick Marston that his pictures can’t shake off the influence. He is great enough to blaze his own trail—to create his own school, rather than to follow in the tracks of another. Of course,” he hastened to defend, “that is hardly a valid indictment. Every master is, at the beginning of his career, strongly affected by the genius of some greater master. The only mistake lies in following in the footsteps of one not yet dead. To play follow-the-leader with a man of a past century is permissible and laudable, but to give the same allegiance to a contemporary is, in the narrow view of the critics, to accept a secondary place.”
The Kentuckian sketched with ardor the dashing brilliance of the other’s achievement: how five years had brought him from lethal obscurity to international fame; how, though a strictly American product who had not studied abroad, his Salon pictures had electrified Paris. And the girl listened with attentive interest.