meanwhile. "Close your eyes." He moved with agile speed, instinctively
finding the best light and thrusting back the furniture to secure a
clearer view. "There!" he cried. "Wait a minute--stand here. _Now_
look!" triumphantly.

Mary opened her eyes. "Why, Stefan, they're wonderful!" she exclaimed.
But even as she spoke, and amidst her sincere admiration, her heart, very
slightly, sank. She knew enough of painting to see that here was genius.
The two fantasies, one representing the spirits of a wind-storm, the
other a mermaid fleeing a merman's grasp, were brilliant in color, line
and conception. They were things of beauty, but it was a beauty strange,
menacing, subhuman. The figures that tore through the clouds urged on the
storm with a wicked and abandoned glee. The face of the merman almost
frightened her; it was repellent in its likeness at once to a fish and a
man. The mermaid's face was less inhuman, but it was stricken with a
horrid terror. She was swimming straight out of the picture as if to
fling herself, shrieking, into the safety of the spectator's arms. The
pictures were imaginative, powerful, arresting, but they were not
pleasing. Few people, she felt, would care to live with them. After a
long scrutiny she turned to her husband, at once glorying in the strength
of his talent and troubled by its quality.

"You are a genius, Stefan," she said.

"You really like them?" he asked eagerly.

"I think they are wonderful!" He was satisfied, for it was her heart, not
her voice, that held a reservation.

Stefan showed her the smaller canvases, some unfinished. Most were of