eminently pictorial; but it's not the river you would have painted
last year; and that mist--I have seen it in a good many pictures
now--is a mist that one can't quite believe in. It's the art that
pays, but it's not the art you talked at Brodonowski's last summer,
that is all."

Lightmark tugged at his moustache a little ruefully. Rainham had an
idea that his ups and downs were tremendous. His mind was a
mountainous country, and if he had elations, he had also depressions
as acute. Yet his elasticity was enormous, and he could throw off
troublesome intruders, in the shape of memories or regrets, with the
ease of a slow-worm casting its skin. And so now his confidence was
only shaken for a moment, and he was able to reply gaily to
Rainham's last thrust:

"My dear fellow, I expect I talked a good deal of trash last year,
after all"--a statement which the other did not find it worth while
to deny.

They had resumed their places at the table, and Lightmark, with a
half-sheet of note-paper before him, was dashing off profiles. They
were all the same--the head of a girl: a childish face with a
straight, small nose, and rough hair gathered up high above her head
in a plain knot. Rainham, leaning over, watched him with an amused
smile.

"The current infatuation, Dick, or the last but one?"

"No," he said; "only a girl I know. Awfully pretty, isn't she?"