It was not likely to be a day for work.  That he felt righteously could not be expected.  Nevertheless, with hurt concession to certain talk of indolence the night before, he donned a painter’s smock and, filled with a consciousness of tremendous energy to be expended in God’s good time, telephoned John Whitaker.

Yes, Brian had been there.  Where he was now, where he would be, Whitaker did not feel at liberty to divulge.  Frankly he was pledged to silence.  Kenny willing, he would be up to dinner at six.  He had a lot to say.

Kenny banged the receiver into the hook in a blaze of temper, hurt and unreasonable, and striding to the rear window flung it up to cool his face.  There were bouillon cups upon the sill.  Bouillon cups!  Bouillon cups!  Thunder-and-turf!  There were bouillon cups everywhere.  Nobody but Brian would have bought so many handles.  A future of handles loomed drearily ahead.  Brian could talk of disorder all he chose.  Half of it was bouillon cups.  Bitterly resenting the reproach they seemed to embody, stacked there upon the sill, Kenny passionately desired to sweep them out of the window once and for all.  The desire of the moment, ever his doom, proved overpowering.  The cups crashed upon a roof below with prompt results.  Kenny was appalled at the number of heads that appeared at studio windows, the head of Sidney Fahr among them, round-eyed and incredulous.  Well, that part at least was normal.  Sid’s face advertised a chronic distrust of his senses.

Moreover, when Pietro appeared after a round of alarmed inquiry, Kenny perversely chose to be truthful about it, insisted that it was not accidental and refused to be sorry.  Afterward he admitted to Garry, it was difficult to believe that one spontaneous ebullition of a nature not untemperamental could provoke so much discussion, frivolous and otherwise.  The thing might grow so, he threatened sulkily, that he’d leave the club.

As for the immediate present, Fate had saddled him again with an afternoon of moody indolence.  Certainly no Irishman with nerves strung to an extraordinary pitch could work with Mike crawling snakily around the lower roof intent upon china remnants whose freaks of shape seemed to paralyze him into moments of agreeable interest.  Kenny at four refused an invitation to tea and waited in growing gloom for Reynolds, a dealer who, prodded always into inconvenient promptness by Kenny’s needs, had promised to combine inspection of the members’ exhibition in the gallery downstairs with the delivery of a check.  There were critical possibilities if he did not appear.

Mike disappeared with the final fragment and Reynolds became the grievance of the hour.  Kenny, fuming aimlessly around the studio, resorted desperately at last to an unfailing means of stimulus.  He made a careful toilet, donned a coat with a foreign looking waist-line, rather high, and experimented with a new and picturesque stock that fastened beneath his tie with a jeweled link.  As six o’clock arrived and Reynolds’ defection became a thing assured, his attitude toward John Whitaker underwent an imperative change.  It would be impossible now to greet him with hostile dignity.  He had become a definite need.