“It was too late—­it would have been, even if he’d been alive.  I packed up my traps, and went down and told Mrs. Stroud.  Of course I didn’t tell her that—­it would have been Greek to her.  I simply said I couldn’t paint him, that I was too moved.  She rather liked the idea—­she’s so romantic!  It was that that made her give me the donkey.  But she was terribly upset at not getting the portrait—­she did so want him ‘done’ by some one showy!  At first I was afraid she wouldn’t let me off—­and at my wits’ end I suggested Grindle.  Yes, it was I who started Grindle:  I told Mrs. Stroud he was the ‘coming’ man, and she told somebody else, and so it got to be true. . . .  And he painted Stroud without wincing; and she hung the picture among her husband’s things. . . .”

He flung himself down in the arm-chair near mine, laid back his head, and clasping his arms beneath it, looked up at the picture above the chimney-piece.

“I like to fancy that Stroud himself would have given it to me, if he’d been able to say what he thought that day.”

And, in answer to a question I put half-mechanically—­“Begin again?” he flashed out.  “When the one thing that brings me anywhere near him is that I knew enough to leave off?”

He stood up and laid his hand on my shoulder with a laugh.  “Only the irony of it is that I am still painting—­since Grindle’s doing it for me!  The Strouds stand alone, and happen once—­but there’s no exterminating our kind of art.”

THE POT-BOILER

I

The studio faced north, looking out over a dismal reach of roofs and chimneys, and rusty fire-escapes hung with heterogeneous garments.  A crust of dirty snow covered the level surfaces, and a December sky with more snow in it lowered over them.

The room was bare and gaunt, with blotched walls and a stained uneven floor.  On a divan lay a pile of “properties”—­limp draperies, an Algerian scarf, a moth-eaten fan of peacock feathers.  The janitor had forgotten to fill the coal-scuttle over-night, and the cast-iron stove projected its cold flanks into the room like a black iceberg.  Ned Stanwell, who had just added his hat and great-coat to the miscellaneous heap on the divan, turned from the empty stove with a shiver.

“By Jove, this is a little too much like the last act of Boheme,” he said, slipping into his coat again after a vain glance at the coal-scuttle.  Much solitude, and a lively habit of mind, had bred in him the habit of audible soliloquy, and having flung a shout for the janitor down the seven flights dividing the studio from the basement, he turned back, picking up the thread of his monologue.  “Exactly like Boheme, really—­that crack in the wall is much more like a stage-crack than a real one—­just the sort of crack Mungold would paint if he were doing a Humble Interior.”