As we watched a fine landscape by Kensett, a stream of sunshine rested a moment on the canvas, giving motion and color, as it were, to the pictured sunlight.

Miss Stuart turned to me.

“Why will you not imprison sunlight in that way, Mr. Desmond?  That would be artistic.”

“You forget,” I said, “if I could put the real sunlight into such a picture, it would no longer be mine; I should be a borrower, not a creator of light; I should be no more of an artist than I am now.”

“You will always refuse to acknowledge it,” she said; “but you can never persuade me that you have not the power to create a sunbeam.  An imprisoned sunbeam!  The idea is absurd.”

“It is because the idea is so absurd,” I said, “that, if I felt the power were mine to imprison sunbeams, I should hardly care to repeat the effort.  The sunshine rests upon the grass, freely we say, but in truth under some law that prevents its penetrating farther.  A sunbeam existing in the absence of the sun is, of course, an absurdity.  Yet they are there, the sunbeams of last spring, in your oval room, as I saw them one day in May.”

“Which convinces me,” said Miss Stuart, “that you are an artist.  That is not real sunshine.  You have created it.  You are born for an artist-life.  Do not go back to your drudgery.”

“Daily work,” I answered, “must become mechanical work, if we perform it in a servile way.  A lawyer is perhaps inspired, when he is engaged in a cause on which he thinks his reputation hangs; but, day by day, when he goes down to the work that brings him his daily bread, he is quite as likely to call it his drudgery as I my daily toil.”

She left her seat and walked with me towards a painting which hung not far from us.  It represented sunset upon the water.  “The tender-curving lines of creamy spray” were gathering up the beach; the light was glistening across the waves; and shadows and light almost seemed to move over the canvas.

“There,” said Miss Stuart, “is what I call work that is worthy.  I know there was inspiration in every touch of the brush.  I know there was happy life in the life that inspired that painting.  It is worth while to live and to show that one has been living in that way.”

“But I think,” said I, “that the artist even of that picture laid aside his brush heavily, when he sighed to himself that he must call it finished.  I believe that in all the days that it lay upon his easel he went to it many times with weariness, because there was monotony in the work,—­because the work that he had laid out for himself in his fancy was far above what he could execute with his fingers.  The days of drudgery hung heavily on the days of inspiration; and it was only when he carried his heart into the most monotonous part of his work that he found any inspiration in it, that he could feel he had accomplished anything.”  We turned suddenly away into a room where we had not been before.  I could not notice the pictures that covered the walls for the sake of one to which Miss Stuart led the way.  After looking upon that, there could be no thought of finding out any other.  It possessed the whole room.  The inspiration which uplifted the eyes fell over the whole painting.  We looked at it silently, and it was not till we had left the building that Miss Stuart said,—­