“She breaks down, becomes livid, at the stupidity of the world, for reviling her idol on his later work, especially the bust of Balzac, which the critics said showed deterioration,” Beth told him, “As if Rodin did not know the mystic Balzac better than the populace.”

“It has always seemed that the mystics of the arts must recognize one another,” Bedient said....  “I do not know Balzac——­”

“You must.  Why, even Taine, Sainte Beuve, and Gautier didn’t know him!  They glorified his work just so long as it had to do with fleshly Paris, but called him mad in his loftier altitudes where they couldn’t follow.”

It was possibly an hour afterward, when Bedient halted before a certain picture longer than others; then went back to another that had interested him.  Moments passed.  He seemed to have forgotten all exteriors, but vibrated at intervals from one to another of these—­two small silent things—­Le Chant du Berger and another.  They were designated only by catalogue numbers.  Beth, who knew them, would have waited hours....  Presently he spoke, and told her long of their effects, what they meant to him.

“You have not been here before?” she asked.

“No.”

“You don’t know who did those pictures?”

“No.”

“Puvis de Chavannes.”

“The name is but a name to me, but the work—­why, they are out of the body entirely!  I can feel the great silence!” he explained, and told her of his cliff and God-mother, of Gobind, the bees, the moon, the standing pools, the lotos, the stars, the forests, the voices and the dreams....  They stood close together, talking very low, and the visitors brushed past, without hearing.

“If not the greatest painter, Puvis de Chavannes is the greatest mural painter of the nineteenth century,” Beth said.  “Rodin, who knew Balzac, also knew Puvis de Chavannes.... ’The mystics of the arts know one another,’” she added.  “I saw Rodin’s bust and statue of these men in Paris.”

To Beth, the incident was of inestimable importance in her conception of Bedient....  A Japanese group interested him later—­an old vender of sweetmeats in a city street, with children about him—­little girls bent forward under the weight of their small brothers.  Beth regarded the picture curiously and waited for Bedient to speak.

“It’s very real,” he said.  “The little girls are crippled from these weights.  The boy babe rides his sister for his first views of the world....  Look at the sweet little girl-faces, haggard from the burden of their fat-cheeked, wet-nosed brothers.  A birth is a miss over there—­a miss for which the mother suffers—­when it is not a boy.  The girls of Japan carry their brothers until they begin to carry their sons.  You need only look at this picture to know that here is a people messing with uniforms and explosives, a people still hot with the ape and the tiger in their breasts.”