The Genius by Theodore Dreiser

everything a dull, even tone." So
that was it.
    "You're drawing this figure as a bricklayer who isn't an
architect might start to build a house. You're laying bricks
without having a plan. Where's your plan?" The voice was that of
Mr. Boyle looking over his shoulder.
    Eugene looked up. He had begun to draw the head only.
    "A plan! A plan!" said his instructor, making a peculiar motion
with his hands which described the outline of the pose in a single
motion. "Get your general lines first. Then you can put in the
details afterward."
    Eugene saw at once.
    Another time his instructor was watching him draw the female
breast. He was doing it woodenly—without much beauty of
contour.
    "They're round! They're round! I tell you!" exclaimed Boyle. "If
you ever see any square ones let me know."
    This caught Eugene's sense of humor. It made him laugh, even
though he flushed painfully, for he knew he had a lot to learn.
    The cruelest thing he heard this man say was to a boy who was
rather thick and fat but conscientious. "You can't draw," he said
roughly. "Take my advice and go home. You'll make more money
driving a wagon."
    The class winced, but this man was ugly in his intolerance of
futility. The idea of anybody wasting his time was obnoxious to
him. He took art as a business man takes business, and he had no
time for the misfit, the fool, or the failure. He wanted his class
to know that art meant effort.
    Aside from this brutal insistence on the significance of art,
there was another side to the life which was not so hard and in a
way more alluring. Between the twenty-five minute poses which the
model took, there were some four or five minute rests during the
course of the evening in which the students talked, relighted their
pipes and did much as they pleased. Sometimes students from other
classes came in for a few moments.
    The thing that astonished Eugene though, was the freedom of the
model with the students and the freedom of the students with her.
After the first few weeks he observed some of those who had been
there the year before going up to the platform where the girl sat,
and talking with her. She had a little pink gauze veil which she
drew around her shoulders or waist that instead of reducing the
suggestiveness of her attitudes heightened them.
    "Say, ain't that enough to make everything go black in front of
your eyes," said one boy sitting next to Eugene.
    "Well, I guess," he laughed. "There's some edge to that."
    The boys would sit and laugh and jest with this girl, and she
would laugh and coquette in return. He saw her strolling about
looking at some of the students' drawings of her over their
shoulders, standing face to face with others—and so calmly. The
strong desire which it invariably aroused in Eugene he quelled and
concealed, for these things were not to be shown on the surface.
Once, while he was looking at some photographs that a student had
brought, she came and looked over his shoulder, this little flower
of the streets, her body graced by the thin scarf, her lips and
cheeks red with color. She came so close that she leaned against
his shoulder and arm with her soft flesh. It pulled him tense, like
a great current; but he made no sign, pretending that it was the
veriest commonplace. Several times, because the piano was there,
and because students would sing and play in the interludes, she
came and sat on the piano stool herself, strumming out an
accompaniment to which some one or three or four would sing.
Somehow this, of all things, seemed most sensuous to him—most
oriental. It set him wild. He felt his teeth click without volition
on his part. When she resumed her pose, his passion subsided, for
then the cold, æsthetic value of her beauty became uppermost. It
was only the incidental things that upset him.
    In spite of these disturbances, Eugene was gradually showing
improvement as a draughtsman and an artist. He liked to draw the
figure. He was not as quick at that as he was at the more