I am not afraid." "So be it, then! I'll watch the duel.

But what road do you follow--music?
literature?
Art of some sort, of course; you are artist all over." Again the fire leaped to the boy's eyes.

He snatched his hand away in quick excitement.
"Look! I will show you!" With the swiftness of lightning he whipped a pencil from his pocket, pushed aside his coffee-cup, and began to draw upon the marble-topped table as though his life depended upon his speed.
For ten minutes he worked feverishly, his face intensely earnest, his head bent over his task, a lock of dark hair drooping across his forehead; then he looked up, throwing himself back in his chair and gazing up at his companion with the egotistical triumph--the intense, childish satisfaction of the artist in the first flush of accomplished work.
"Look! Look, now, at this!" The Irishman laughed sympathetically; the artist, as belonging to a race apart, was known by him and liked, but he rose and came round the table with a certain scepticism.

Life had taught him that temperament and output are different things.
He leaned over the boy's chair; then suddenly he laid his hand on his shoulder and gripped it, his own face lighting up.
"Why, boy!" he cried.

"This is clever--clever--clever! I'm a Dutchman, if this isn't the real thing! Why on earth didn't you tell me you could do it ?" The boy laughed in sheer delight and, bending over the table, added a lingering touch or two to his work--a rough expressive sketch of himself standing back from an easel, a palette in his left hand, a brush in his right, his hair unkempt, his whole attitude comically suggestive of an artist in a moment of delirious oblivion.