He laughed gaily, a trifle defiantly: 

“You’ve said it.  You’ve found the fly in the amber.  I’m cursed with facility.  Worse still it gives me keenest pleasure to employ it.  It does scare me occasionally—­has for years—­makes me miserable at intervals—­fills me full of all kinds of fears and doubts.”

He turned toward her, standing on his ladder, the big palette curving up over his left shoulder, a wet brush extended in his right hand: 

“What shall I do!” he exclaimed so earnestly that she sat up straight, startled, forgetting her pose.  “Ought I to stifle the vigour, the energy, the restless desire that drives me to express myself—­that will not tolerate the inertia of calculation and ponderous reflection?  Ought I to check myself, consider, worry, entangle myself in psychologies, seek for subtleties where none exist—­split hairs, relapse into introspective philosophy when my fingers itch for a lump of charcoal and every colour on my set palette yells at me to be about my business?”

He passed the flat tip of his wet brush through the mass of rags in his left hand with a graceful motion like one unsheathing a sword: 

“I tell you I do the things which I do, as easily, as naturally, as happily as any fool of a dicky-bird does his infernal twittering on an April morning.  God knows whether there’s anything in my work or in his twitter; but neither he nor I are likely to improve our output by pondering and cogitation....  Please resume the pose.”

She did so, her dark young eyes on him; and he continued painting and talking in his clear, rapid, decisive manner: 

“My name is Louis Neville.  They call me Kelly—­my friends do,” he added, laughing.  “Have you ever seen any of my work?”

“Yes.”

He laughed again:  “That’s more soothing.  However, I suppose you saw that big canvas of mine for the ceiling of the Metropolitan Museum’s new northwest wing.  The entire town saw it.”

“Yes, I saw it.”

“Did you care for it?”

She had cared for it too intensely to give him any adequate answer.  Never before had her sense of colour and form and beauty been so exquisitely satisfied by the painted magic of any living painter.  So this was the man who had enveloped her, swayed her senses, whirled her upward into his ocean of limpid light!  This was the man who had done that miracle before which, all day long, crowds of the sober, decent, unimaginative—­the solid, essentials of the nation—­had lingered fascinated!  This was the man—­across there on a stepladder.  And he was evidently not yet thirty; and his name was Neville and his friends called him Kelly.

“Yes,” she said, diffidently, “I cared for it.”

“Really?”

He caught her eye, laughed, and went on with his work.

“The critics were savage,” he said.  “Lord!  It hurts, too.  But I’ve simply got to be busy.  What good would it do me to sit down and draw casts with a thin, needle-pointed stick of hard charcoal.  Not that they say I can’t draw.  They admit that I can.  They admit that I can paint, too.”