“Nothing,” stammered Lewis—­“nothing except goats.”

“Ah, yes, goats,” said Leighton, but his thoughts were not on goats.  Back in his den, he took from a drawer in the great oak desk the kid that Lewis had molded in clay and its broken legs, for another had gone.  He looked at the fragments thoughtfully.  “To my mind,” he said, “there is little doubt but that you could become efficient at terra-cotta designing; you might even become a sculptor.”

“A sculptor!” repeated Lewis, as though he voiced a dream.

Leighton paid no attention to the interruption.  “I hesitate, however, to give you a start toward art because you carry an air of success with you.  One predicts success for you too—­too confidently.  And success in art is a formidable source of danger.”

“Success a source of danger, Dad?”

“In art,” corrected Leighton.

“Yesterday,” he continued, “you wanted to stop at a shop window, and I wouldn’t let you.  The window contained an inane repetition display of thirty horrible prints at two and six each of Lalan’s ‘Triumph.’” Leighton sprang to his feet.  “God!  Poster lithographs at two and six!  Boy, Lalan’s ‘Triumph’ was a triumph once.  He turned it into a mere success.  Before the paint was dry, he let them commercialize his picture, not in sturdy, faithful prints, but in that—­that rubbish.”

Leighton strode up and down the room, his arms behind him, his eyes on the floor.

“Taking art into the poor man’s home, they call it.  Bah!  If you multiply the greatest glory that the genius of man ever imprisoned, and put it all over the walls of your house,—­bath, kitchen and under the bed,—­you’ll find the mean level of that glory is reduced to the terms of the humblest of household utensils.”

A smile nickered in Lewis’s eyes, but Leighton did not look up.

“Art is never a constant,” he continued.  “It feeds on spirit, and spirit is evanescent.  A truly great picture should be seen by the comparative few.  What every one possesses is necessarily a commonplace.

“And now, to get back.  I have never talked seriously to you before; I may never do it again.  The essence, the distinctive finesse, of breeding, lies in a trained gaiety and an implied sincerity.  But what I must say to you is this:  Even in this leveling age there are a few of us who look with terror upon an incipient socialism; who believe money as money to be despicable and food and clothing, incidental; who abhor equality, cherish sorrow and suffering and look uponeducation—­knowledge of living before God and man—­as the ultimate and only source of content.  That’s a creed.  I’d like to have you think on it.  I’d like to have my boy join the Old Guard.  Do you begin to see how success in art may become a danger?”

“Yes,” said Lewis, “I think I do.  I think you mean that—­that in selling art one is apt to sell one’s self.”

“H—­m—­m!” said Leighton, “you are older than I am.  I’ll take you to Paris to-morrow.”