“Let me forget my work for a little while,” pleaded his visitor, “and look at yours.”
Sedgwick rose. “Come up-stairs,” he said, and led the way to the big, bare, bright studio.
From the threshold Chester Kent delivered an opinion, after one approving survey. “You really work, I see.”
“I really do. Where do you see it, though?”
“All over the place. No draperies or fripperies or fopperies of art here. The barer the room, the more work done in it.”
He walked over to a curious contrivance resembling a small hand-press, examined it, surveyed the empty easel, against which were leaning, face in, a number of pictures, all of a size, and turned half a dozen of them over, ranging them and stepping back for examination. Standing before them, he whistled a long passage from La Bohème, and had started to rewhistle it in another key, when the artist broke in with some impatience.
“Well?”
“Good work,” pronounced Kent quietly, and in some subtle way the commonplace words conveyed to their hearer the fact that the man who spoke them knew.
“It’s the best there is in me, at least,” said Sedgwick.
Kent went slowly around the walls, keenly examining, silently appraising. There were landscapes, genre bits, studies of the ocean in its various moods, flashes of pagan imaginings, nature studies; a wonderful picture of wild geese settling from a flight; a no less striking sketch of a mink, startled as he crept to drink among the sedges; a group of country children at hop-scotch on the sands; all the varied subjects handled with a deftness of truth and drawing, and colored with a clear softness quite individual.