“Now, if you have no objection.”

“I have not the slightest, provided I can have a duplicate, in case I like it.”

He complied readily, and she took a position requisite for the work.

“Look away over the river, if you please.”

He did not know how much these words implied.  Her gaze was far away, and would ever be, for her real home was beyond.

He succeeded at the first effort, and asked her judgment upon it.

“Truthful and correct,” she said.  “Now another for me, if you please.”

“This is yours.  I shall idealize mine, and in it I shall sketch you as you appear to me.  Mine would not please you, I know.”

“You judge me correctly.  I wish my portrait to be exactly like myself.”

“Yet if you sketched, you would want to draw your friends profiles as they appeared to you, would you not?”

“Certainly.  Is this your speciality, heads, or do you go to nature and reproduce her wonderous moods and shades with your pencil?”

“My great ideal is Nature.  You, too, are an artist.”

“I have no talent whatever, but the deepest sympathy with Nature, and an appreciation of her harmonies.”

“Do you not paint flowers, or sketch home scenes?”

“I have never used pencil or brush, and yet I feel at times such longings within me to give expression to my states, I think I must have, at least, some latent power in that direction.”

“As all have.  I could teach you in a very short time, to sketch woods, hills, and skies.”

“I think I should never copy.  You don’t know how foreign it is to my nature to copy anything.  I should respect artists more if they did not copy so much.  I reverence the past; I honor and admire the pure lives and noble works of those who are gone; but where are the new saints and the new masters?  Was genius buried with Michael Angelo and Raphael?  The same God who inspired their lives, inspires ours.  We can make ourselves illustrious in our own way.  We may not all paint, but whatever our work is, that should we do as individuals.  If we copy, we shall have no genius to transmit to future generations.”

Dawn wished to be pardoned if she had wearied her listener, but she saw at once, as she looked on his face, that the thoughts she had expressed were accepted, and that her words had not fallen on unappreciative ears.

“You have spoken my own views, and if my health remains, I shall give the world my best efforts in my own way.  Nature shall be my study.  I will not fall a worshipper, like Correggio, to light and shade, but use them as adjuncts to the great idea which must ever dwell in the soul of the faithful artist, to give the whole of nature.”

“I would not have spoken so much upon a theme even so dear to me as this, had I not felt that you would accept my thoughts, and therefore knew that I should not weary you.”

“I shall see you before you go,” he said, retaining her hand which she extended, as she arose to leave.