Caught unawares Garry flushed and stammered.

“Why,” he evaded uncomfortably, “it began about the peasant picture in the grillroom.  Everybody likes it.”

“And then?”

“We talked some of the last thing you did—­the winter landscape of snow and pines.”

Garry looked away.

“Out with it!” said Kenny suspiciously.  “For God’s sake grant me the privilege at least of lumping it all in one supreme period of upheaval.  They didn’t like the pine picture?”

“On the contrary,” Garry hastened to assure him, “Hazleton said you are brilliantly skillful.”

“Brilliantly skillful!  But?” prompted Kenny and looked a question.  “Brilliant skill,” he added moodily, “doesn’t always make a big painter.”

“Hazleton said as much,” admitted Garry.

“I suppose it’s best to tell you, Kenny,” he added honestly, hoping to spur the culprit on to more and better work.  “It may help.  They said downstairs that you interpret everything, even trees and snow, in terms of unreality.  You over-idealize.  I suppose it’s your eternal need of illusion.  We’ve spoken of that before.”

“I’m not a photographer!” blazed Kenny.  “Any camera will give you realistic detail.  Artistic too.  What else?  Go on, Garry.  I’m calloused to the hearing of anything.  I merely thank God you’ve had no newspaper training.”

“Most of the older painters,” Garry said with reluctance, “seem to feel that—­well, there’s too colorful a dominance of self in your work.  Your personality always overshadows.  You’ve an extraordinary fluency with color, a deft assurance, a brilliancy that leaves one rather breathless and incredulous, but what you do is autocratically, unforgettably—­almost unforgivably—­you!”

“Art,” explained Kenny loftily, “is reality plus personality.  And personalities are variously vivid and anaemic.  Unreal, over-idealized, too colorful a dominance of self and personality overshadows,” he summarized after an interval of silence.  “And in the face of that—­success.  I am successful?”

“Undeniably.”

“Even Hazleton, with his sordid gangs of Eastsiders nudging each other on a dirty bench, can’t deny it,” bristled Kenny.

He had divided the honors of more than one exhibition with Hazleton and admired and resented him impartially.

“It has been said,” said Garry, ruffled by his air of triumph, “that you paint down subtly to the popular fancy where you might paint up to your own ideals.”

The barb went home.  Kenny flushed.

“Your work,” added Garry, “lacks the force and depth of sincerity.  Even in Brian’s dreadful East River sunset over there, there’s a quality you lack, an eagerness for reality and truth and life as it is.  Brian has painted poorly what he saw but he painted boats for ragged sailors.  Real boats.  You’ve painted brilliantly, in the pine picture for instance, what you wanted to see, a dark forest for mystic folk to dance in when the moonlight lies upon the snow.”