Moreover there was in the painting of this picture a certain candour amounting to stupidity—­an uncertainty—­a naive, groping sort of brush work.  It seemed to be technically, almost deliberately, muddled.

There was a tentative timidity about it that surprised his own technical assurance—­almost moved him to contempt.

What had he been trying to do?  For what had he been searching in those slow, laborious, almost painful brush strokes—­in that clumsy groping for values, in the painstaking reticence, the joyless and mathematical establishment of a sombre and uninspiring key, in the patient plotting of simpler planes where space and quiet reigned unaccented?

“Lord!” he said, biting his lip.  “I’ve been stung by the microbe of the precious!  I’ll be talking Art next with both thumbs and a Vandyke beard.”

Still, through his self-disgust, a sensation of respect for the canvas at which he was scowling, persisted.  Nor could he account for the perfectly unwelcome and involuntary idea that there was, about the half-finished portrait, something almost dignified in the very candour of its painting.

John Burleson came striding in while he was still examining it.  He usually came about tea time, and the door was left open after five o’clock.

“O-ho!” he said in his big, unhumorous voice, “what in hell and the name of Jimmy Whistler have we here?”

“Mud,” said Neville, shortly—­“like Mr. Whistler’s.”

“He was muddy—­sometimes,” said John, seriously, “but you never were until this.”

“Oh, I know it, Johnny.  Something infected me.  I merely tried to do what isn’t in me.  And this is the result.  When a man decides he has a mission, you can never tell what fool thing he’ll be guilty of.”

“It’s Valerie West, isn’t it?” demanded John, bluntly.

“She won’t admire you for finding any resemblance,” said Neville, laughing.

The big sculptor rubbed his big nose reflectively.

“After all,” he said, “what is so bad about it, Kelly?”

“Oh, everything.”

“No, it isn’t.  There’s something about it that’s—­different—­and interesting—­”

“Oh, shut up, John, and fix yourself a drink—­”

“Kelly, I’m telling you that it isn’t bad—­that there’s something terribly solid and sincere about this beginning—­”

He looked around with a bovine grunt as Sam Ogilvy and Harry Annan came mincing in:  “I say, you would-be funny fellows!—­come over and tell Kelly Neville that he’s got a pretty good thing here if he only has the brains to develop it!”

Neville lighted a cigarette and looked on cynically as Ogilvy and Annan joined Burleson on tiptoe, affecting exaggerated curiosity.

“I think it’s rotten,” said Annan, after a moment’s scrutiny; “don’t you, Sam?”

Ogilvy, fists thrust deep into the pockets of his painting jacket, eyed the canvas in silence.