This room, which served for studio, bedroom, and sitting-room, was bare and dusty.  Below the window the river in spring flood rushed down the valley, a stream, of molten bronze.  Harz dodged before the canvas like a fencer finding his distance; Dawney took his seat on a packingcase.

“The snows have gone with a rush this year,” he drawled.  “The Talfer comes down brown, the Eisack comes down blue; they flow into the Etsch and make it green; a parable of the Spring for you, my painter.”

Harz mixed his colours.

“I’ve no time for parables,” he said, “no time for anything.  If I could be guaranteed to live to ninety-nine, like Titian—­he had a chance.  Look at that poor fellow who was killed the other day!  All that struggle, and then—­just at the turn!”

He spoke English with a foreign accent; his voice was rather harsh, but his smile very kindly.

Dawney lit a cigarette.

“You painters,” he said, “are better off than most of us.  You can strike out your own line.  Now if I choose to treat a case out of the ordinary way and the patient dies, I’m ruined.”

“My dear Doctor—­if I don’t paint what the public likes, I starve; all the same I’m going to paint in my own way; in the end I shall come out on top.”

“It pays to work in the groove, my friend, until you’ve made your name; after that—­do what you like, they’ll lick your boots all the same.”

“Ah, you don’t love your work.”

Dawney answered slowly:  “Never so happy as when my hands are full.  But I want to make money, to get known, to have a good time, good cigars, good wine.  I hate discomfort.  No, my boy, I must work it on the usual lines; I don’t like it, but I must lump it.  One starts in life with some notion of the ideal—­it’s gone by the board with me.  I’ve got to shove along until I’ve made my name, and then, my little man—­then—­”

“Then you’ll be soft!”

“You pay dearly for that first period!”

“Take my chance of that; there’s no other way.”

“Make one!”

“Humph!”

Harz poised his brush, as though it were a spear: 

“A man must do the best in him.  If he has to suffer—­let him!”

Dawney stretched his large soft body; a calculating look had come into his eyes.

“You’re a tough little man!” he said.

“I’ve had to be tough.”

Dawney rose; tobacco smoke was wreathed round his unruffled hair.

“Touching Villa Rubein,” he said, “shall I call for you?  It’s a mixed household, English mostly—­very decent people.”

“No, thank you.  I shall be painting all day.  Haven’t time to know the sort of people who expect one to change one’s clothes.”

“As you like; ta-to!” And, puffing out his chest, Dawney vanished through a blanket looped across the doorway.

Harz set a pot of coffee on a spirit-lamp, and cut himself some bread.  Through the window the freshness of the morning came; the scent of sap and blossom and young leaves; the scent of earth, and the mountains freed from winter; the new flights and songs of birds; all the odorous, enchanted, restless Spring.