“Burn them!” said Mr. Penway, lighting a cigar with the air of one restoring his tissues after a strenuous ordeal. “Burn the lot. They’re awful. Darned amateur nightmares. They offend the eye. Cast them into a burning fiery furnace.”
Kirk nodded. The criticism was just. It erred, if at all, on the side of mildness. Certainly something had happened to him since he perpetrated those daubs. He had developed. He saw things with new eyes.
“I guess I had better start right in again at the beginning,” he said.
So Kirk settled down to a routine of hard work; and, so doing, drove another blow at the wedge which was separating his life from Ruth’s. There were days now when they did not meet at all, and others when they saw each other for a few short moments in which neither seemed to have much to say.
Ruth had made a perfunctory protest against the new departure.
“Really,” she said, “it does seem absurd for you to spend all your time down at that old studio. It isn’t as if you had to. But, of course, if you want to——”
And she had gone on to speak of other subjects. It was plain to Kirk that his absence scarcely affected her. She was still in the rapids, and every day carried her farther away from him.
It did not hurt him now. A sort of apathy seemed to have fallen on him. The old days became more and more remote. Sometimes he doubted whether anything remained of her former love for him, and sometimes he wondered if he still loved her. She was so different that it was almost as if she were a stranger. Once they had had everything in common. Now it seemed to him that they had nothing—not even Bill.
He did not brood upon it. He gave himself no time for that. He worked doggedly on under the blasphemous but efficient guidance of Mr. Penway. He was becoming a man with a fixed idea—the idea of making good.
He began to make headway. His beginnings were small, but practical. He no longer sat down when the spirit moved him to dash off vague masterpieces which might turn into something quite unexpected on the road to completion; he snatched at anything definite that presented itself.
Sometimes it was a couple of illustrations to a short story in one of the minor magazines, sometimes a picture to go with an eulogy of a patent medicine. Whatever it was, he seized upon it and put into it all the talent he possessed. And thanks to the indefatigable coaching of Robert Dwight Penway, a certain merit was beginning to creep into his work. His drawing was growing firmer. He no longer shirked difficulties.