“It was an act of Providence,” declared the latter. “If I hadn’t, we might have gone on this way until—it was too late to do anything.”
“To do anything?”
“Too late for you to take up Art.”
The father glanced up with the old evil spirit again in his eyes.
“Don’t go back to that,” he pleaded.
“Why not? That’s what you’ve got to do. And after all, you’re an artist in your own way. Look at the scroll on the Acme doors! Look at your stand against the Union! That was a stroke of art. Art is nothing but independence. Art is nothing but being yourself—expressing yourself. You’ve done that consistently whenever you’ve really been yourself. You didn’t stop to consider how much you were going to lose in shekels when you told the crowd you’d go busted by yourself rather than make a fortune under them.”
Horatio Barnes smiled grimly.
“No one but a true artist could have done that,” insisted the son. “Any other would have reckoned the cost and swallowed the pill.”
“But I beat ’em,” chuckled the father.
“Art beats every time,” declared Barnes. “It’s the one thing a man may pin his faith to. But that wasn’t your biggest piece of work as an artist. You transcended that. You really proved yourself when you married mother. It was then that you were true to your highest standard, because then you were truest to yourself. You could have married a fortune had you chosen and saved yourself twenty years of hard work. You could have married old Arbuckle’s daughter and placed the Acme where it is to-day two decades ago. Are you sorry you didn’t?”