Peter was not especially ready, save with a brush in his hand. He wanted to say something to the effect that Osmond was playing the biggest of all games, with the visible universe against him; but he hardly knew how to put it. It seemed, though, as if he might some time paint it into a picture. But Osmond was recognizing the danger of soft implication, and bluffly turned the talk.
"Well, Pete, you've done it, haven't you?"
There was no possibility of affecting to misunderstand. Peter knew what he had gone to Paris for, five years ago, and why Osmond had been sending him the steady proceeds of the garden farm. He was to prove himself, take his talent in his hand and mould it and turn it about with a constant will, and shape a cup to hold the drink that makes the gods jealous and men delirious with adulation. Peter was to live at his ease in Paris, sparing nothing that would keep him well and strong of heart, so that he could paint the best portraits in the world. Peter knew he had begun to paint the best portraits in the world, because he had done many good ones and one actual marvel, and suddenly, as it sometimes is in art after we have been patient and discouraged, the whole task seemed to him a light and easy one. In his extraordinary youth he had the freshness of his brain, his quick eye and obedient hand, and he felt, lightly and gayly, that he was rich,--but rich in a world where there was plenty more of whatever he might lose.
"I guess so," he said, returning to the speech of his youth. "And I can do it twice, old man. I can do it a hundred times."
Osmond stopped and laid a hand on a boulder at the termination of their way, where the lane opened into plowed fields. He looked off through the distance as if he saw the courts of the world and all the roads that run to fame. His eyes were burning. The hand trembled upon the rock.
"It's amazing that the world can hold so much for one man. You wouldn't think there would be water enough in all the rivers for one man to drink so deep. What does Electra say?"
"Didn't you speak of it? Why, you're covered with laurel, boy, like Jack-in-the-Green. She couldn't help seeing it."
Peter, brought back to that luckless interview with the imperial lady, felt shamefaced in his knowledge of it.