A prodigal display—­Kenny in his shifting periods of affluence was always prodigal—­but there had never been cups enough with handles in the littered closet, Garry recalled, until Brian inspired had bought too many bouillon cups, figuring that one handle always would be left; Kenny could not remember to buy a teapot when he could and made tea in a chafing dish; and he had been known to serve highballs in vases.

Garry glanced expectantly at his host and found him but a blur of oriental color in a film of smoke.  As usual, when he was in a temper or excited, he was smoking furiously.  But the threat of disinheritance was not forthcoming.  If anything, the disinheritor was sulking.  And the eyes of the disinheritee were intelligent and disconcerting.

“Well?” said Garry, amazed.

“I’ve already been disinherited,” explained Brian dryly.  “Twice.  And I’m leaving tonight—­for good.”

Garry sat up.

“You mean?” demanded Kenny coldly.

“I mean,” flung out Brian, “that I’m tired of it all.  I’m sick to death of painting sunsets.”

Garry’s startled glance sought and found a mediocre sunset on an easel.  Brian went in for sunsets.  He said so himself with an inexplicable air of weariness and disgust.  He knew how to make them.

Kenny’s glance too had found the sunset.  It stood beside a landscape, brilliant and unforgettable, of his own.  Both men looked away.  Brian smiled.

“You see?” he said quietly.

“Sunsets!” stammered Kenny, perversely taking up the keynote of his son’s rebellion literally.  “Sunsets!  I warned you, Brian—­”

“Sunsets,” said Brian, “and everything else you put on canvas with paint and brush.  I can’t paint.  You know it.  Garry knows it.  I know it.  I’ve painted, Kenny, merely to please you.  I’ve nothing more than a commonplace skill whipped into shape by an art school.  Aerial battlefields—­my sunsets—­in more ways than one.  I paint ’em because they happen to be the thing in Nature that thrills me most.  And when I fire to a thing, most always I can manage somehow.  You yourself have engineered for me every profitable commission I’ve ever had.  What’s more, Kenny, if ever once you’d put into real art the dreadful energy I’ve put into my mediocrity—­”

“You mean I’m lazy?” interrupted Kenny, bristling.

“Certainly not,” said Brian with acid politeness.  “You’re merely subject to periodic fits of indolence.  You’ve said as much yourself.”

It was irrefutable.  Kenny, offended, brought his fist down upon the table with a bang.

“I know precisely what you’re going to say,” cut in Brian.  “I’m ungrateful.  I’m not.  But it’s misdirected generosity on your part, Kenny.  And I’m through.  I’m tired,” he added simply.  “I want to live my own life away from the things I can’t do well.  I’m tired of drifting.”

“And to-night?”