Rudyard Kipling 73 “Go and design decorative medallions for rich brewers’ houses. You are thoroughly good at that.” Dick was sick and savage. “Better things than medallions, Dick,” was the answer, in tones that recalled a gray-eyed atom’s fearless speech to Mrs. Jennett. Dick would have abased himself utterly, but that other girl trailed in. Next Sunday he laid at Maisie’s feet small gifts of pencils that could almost draw of themselves and colors in whose permanence he believed, and he was Ostentatiously attentive to the work in hand. It demanded, among other things, an exposition of the faith that was in him. Torpenhow’s hair would have stood on end had he heard the fluency with which Dick preached his own gospel of Art. A month before, Dick would have been equally astonished; but it was Maisie’s will and pleasure, and he dragged his words together to make plain to her comprehension all that had been hidden to himself of the whys and wherefores of work. There is not the least difficulty in doing a thing if you only know how to do it; the trouble is to explain your method. “T could put this right if I had a brush in my hand,” said Dick, despairingly, over the modeling of a chin that Maisie complained would not “look flesh,” — it was the same chin that she had scraped out with the palette knife, — “but I find it almost impossible to teach you. There’s a queer grin, Dutch touch about your painting that I like; but I’ve a notion that you're weak in drawing. You foreshorten as though you never used the model, and you’ve caught Kami’s pasty way of dealing with flesh in shadow. Then, again, though you don’t know it yourself, you shirk hard work. Suppose you spend some of your time on line lone. Line doesn’t allow of shirking. Oils do, and three square inches of flashy, tricky stuff in the corner of a