“No,” she laughed.  “Only please don’t tell me that I’m only a little ahead of my time; that presently these things will dart into the public mood, and people will squabble among themselves to possess them——­”

“I might have told you just that—­if you hadn’t warned me....  I like your woods; they’re the sort of woods that fairies come to; and I like your fields and afternoons—­I can hear the bees and forget myself in them.  I know they’re good.”

The Grey One whipped out a match and cigarette from the pocket of her blouse, lit it and stared at her covered easel.  “You have your way, don’t you?” she asked, and her lips were tightened to keep from trembling.

“It isn’t a way,” he said.  “It’s a matter of feeling.  I never judge a book or picture, but when I feel them, they are good to me.  I would have stopped before some of these in any gallery, because I feel them.  They make me steal away——­”

“I’m hard-hearted and a scoffer,” she said, holding fast.  “It isn’t that I want to be—­oh, you are different.  I don’t believe you were ever tired!...  I see what David Cairns meant about your coming up here out of the seas with a fresh eye—­and all your ideals....  Don’t you see—­we’re all tired out!  New York has made us put our ideals away—­commercial, romantic—­every sort of ideal....  Oh, it’s harder for a woman to talk like this than for a man; she’s slower to learn it.  When a woman does learn it, you may know she carries scars——­”

The Grey One arose.  She looked tall and gaunt, and her eyes had that burning look which dries tears before they can be shed.  He did not hasten to speak.

“It’s crude to talk so to you, but you came to-day,” she went on.  “I had about given up.  The race—­oh, it’s a race to sanctuary right enough—­but so long!...  In the forenoons one can run, but strength doesn’t last.”

With a quick movement, the Grey One tossed up the covering from the easel.  He saw a girl in red, natty figure, piquant face.  It was not finished.  She was to stand at the head of a saddle-horse, as yet embryonic.  She stepped hastily to a little desk and poked at a formidable pile of business-looking correspondence.

“Do these look like an artist’s communications?” she asked in the dry pent way that goes with burning eyes....  “They are not, but letters to one who paints for lithographers’ stones!  See here——­”

And now she lifted a couch-cover, and drew from beneath a big portfolio which she opened on the floor before him.  It was filled with flaring magazine covers, calendars, and other painted products having to do with that expensive sort of advertising which packing-houses and steel-shops afford. Girls—­girls mounted side and astride, girls in racing-shells and skiting motor-boats, in limousines and runabouts, in dirigibles and ’planes;—­seaside, mountain and prairie girls; house-boat, hunting and skating girls; even a vivid parlor variety—­all conventional, colorful and unsigned.