“What kind of an artist is Mr. Wharton?” asked Catherine.

“A sort of superior house-painter,” replied Strong.  “He sometimes does glazing.”

“Nonsense!” said Catherine contemptuously.  “I know all about him.  Esther has told me.  I want to know how good an artist he is.  What would they think of him in Paris?”

“That would depend on whether they owned any of his pictures,” persisted Strong.  “I think he might be worse.  But then I have one of his paintings, and am waiting to sell it when the market price gets well up.  Do you see it?  The one over my desk in the corner.  How do you like it?”

“Why does he make it so dark and dismal?” asked Catherine.  “I can’t make it out.”

“That is the charm,” he replied.  “I never could make it out myself; let’s ask him;” and he called across the room:  “Wharton, will you explain to Miss Brooke what your picture is about?  She wants to know, and you are the only man who can tell her.”

Wharton in his grave way came over to them, and first looking sadly at Miss Brooke, then at the picture, said at length, as though to himself:  “I thought it was good when I did it.  I think it is pretty good now.  What criticism do you make, Miss Brooke?”

Catherine was in mortal terror, but stood her ground like a heroine.  “I said it seemed to me dark, Mr. Wharton, and I asked why you made it so.”

Wharton looked again at the picture and meditated over it.  Then he said:  “Do you think it would be improved by being lighter?”

Although Catherine pleaded guilty to this shocking heresy, she did it with so much innocence of manner that, in a few minutes, Wharton was captured by her sweet face, and tried to make her understand his theory that the merit of a painting was not so much in what it explained as in what it suggested.  Comments from the by-standers interfered with his success.  Hazard especially perplexed Catherine’s struggling attention by making fun of Wharton’s lecture.

“Your idea of a picture,” said he, “must seem to Miss Brooke like my Cincinnati parishioner’s idea of a corn-field.  I was one day admiring his field of Indian corn, which stretched out into the distance like Lake Erie in a yellow sunset, when the owner, looking at his harvest as solemnly as Wharton is looking at his picture, said that what he liked most was the hogs he could see out of it.”

“Well,” said Wharton, “the Dutch made a good school out of men like him.  Art is equal to any thing.  I will paint his hogs for him, slaughtered and hung up by the hind legs, and if I know how to paint, I can put his corn-field into them, like Ostade, and make the butchers glow with emotion.”

“Don’t believe him, Miss Brooke,” said Hazard.  “He wants you to do his own work, and if you give in to him you are lost.  He covers a canvas with paint and then asks you to put yourself into it.  He might as well hold up a looking-glass to you.  Any man can paint a beautiful picture if he could persuade Miss Brooke to see herself in it.”