“It may or may not interest you two to know that I was in bed,” he began irritably.  “I wish to Heaven you’d fight in union hours.”

Brian was sorry and said so.  Kenny, however, took immediate advantage of Garry’s attitude to sidetrack what he considered the preposterous irrelevance of the shotgun, the one unessential thing in the studio, and point with rising temper to the statuette.  It had, alas! been a birthday present from Ann Marvin, whose statuettes, fashionable and satiric, were famous.

It was like Kenny to have a grievance.  He was hardly ever without one.  But justification was rare indeed and he made the best of it.  He said all that was on his mind without restraint as to duration or intensity, thunderstruck at Brian’s white-hot response.  For twenty minutes of Irish fire and fury, Garry listened in amazement, sensing an unaccustomed stubbornness in Brian’s anger.

“Just a minute,” said Garry, dazed.  “Let’s get down to brass tacks.  Who and what began it?”

They both told him.

“One at a time, please!” he begged.  “I gather that you, Kenny, in need of petty funds, went out to pawn Brian’s shotgun.  And you, Brian, losing your temper, flung a brush across the studio and smashed a valued statuette—­”

Kenny chose indignantly to tell it all again and overshot the mark, bringing Garry down upon him with a bark.

“Now, see here, Kenny,” he interposed curtly, “that’s enough.  Brian’s usually sane and regular.  It’s by no means a criminal offense for him to pick a row with you about his shotgun.  And he didn’t mean to smash the statuette.”

He waited for the voice of thunder in which Kenny, at a disadvantage, would be sure to disinherit his son and, waiting, glanced a trifle wryly at the littered studio.  What Brian lost by chronic disinheritance lay ever before the eye, particularly now when Kenny, in one of his periods of insolvency, was posted downstairs for club debt and Mrs. Haggerty’s insular notions about credit had driven him to certain frugal devices with the few handkerchiefs he owned, one of which was spread upon the nearest window pane to dry.

Garry’s disgusted inventory missed nothing:  a prayer rug for which Kenny had toured into the south of Persia and led an Arabian Nights’ existence with pursuing bandits whom, by some extraordinary twist of genius, he had conciliated and painted; an illuminated manuscript in Gaelic which he claimed had been used by a warrior to ransom a king; chain armor, weapons of all kinds, climes and periods; an Alpine horn, reminiscent of the summer Kenny had saved a young painter’s life at the risk of his own; some old masters, a cittern, a Chinese cheng with tubes and reeds, an ancient psaltery with wires you struck with a crooked stick that was always lost (Kenny when the mood was upon him evolved weird music from them all), an Italian dulcimer, a Welsh crwth that was unpronounceably interesting (some of the strings you twanged with your thumb and some you played with a bow); Chinese, Japanese, Indian vases, some alas! sufficiently small for utilitarian purposes, Salviati glass, feather embroidery, carved chairs and a chest.