“That’s right.  We can’t love a man who has never endured what we have,” said another.  “No genius can hide his own immunity.  That man paints with an unscarred soul.  A little hell for his—­and no living painter could stand beside him.”

“Piffle,” observed John Burleson.

Ogilvy said:  “It is true, I think, that out of human suffering a quality is distilled which affects everything one does.  Those who have known sorrow can best depict it—­not perhaps most plausibly, but most convincingly—­and with fewer accessories, more reticence, and—­better taste.”

“Why do you want to paint tragedies?” demanded Burleson.

“One need not paint them, John, but one needs to understand them to paint anything else—­needs to have lived them, perhaps, to become a master of pictured happiness, physical or spiritual.”

“That’s piffle, too!” said Burleson in his rumbling bass—­“like that damn hen you lugged in—­”

A shout of laughter relieved everybody.

“Do you want a fellow to go and poke his head into trouble and get himself mixed up in a tragedy so that he can paint better?” insisted Burleson, scornfully.

“There’s usually no necessity to hunt trouble,” said Annan.

“But you say that Kelly never had any and that he’d paint better if he had.”

“Trouble might be the making of Kelly Neville,” mused Ogilvy, “and it might not.  It depends, John, not on the amount and quality of the hell, but on the man who’s frying on the gridiron.”

Annan said:  “Personally I don’t see how Kelly could paint happiness or sorrow or wonder or fear into any of his creations any more convincingly than he does.  And yet—­and yet—­sometimes we love men for their shortcomings—­for the sincerity of their blunders—­for the fallible humanity in them.  That after all is where love starts.  The rest—­what Kelly shows us—­evokes wonder, delight, awe, enthusiasm....  If he could only make us love him—­”

“I love him!” said Burleson.

“We all are inclined to—­if we could get near enough to him,” said Annan with a faint smile.

“Him—­or his work?”

“Both, John.  There’s a vast amount of nonsense talked about the necessity of separation between a man and his work—­that the public has no business with the creator, only with his creations.  It is partly true.  Still, no man ever created anything in which he did not include a sample of himself—­if not what he himself is, at least what he would like to be and what he likes and dislikes in others.  No creator who shows his work can hope to remain entirely anonymous.  And—­I am not yet certain that the public has no right to make its comments on the man who did the work as well as on the work which it is asked to judge.”

“The man is nothing; the work everything,” quoted Burleson, heavily.

“So I’ve heard,” observed Annan, blandly.  “It’s rather a precious thought, isn’t it, John?”