“Can't, Barney. Mr. Hunt”—the name given the painter at his original christening—“asked the Duchess and me to have dinner up here. He's to cook it himself.”      

       “For your sake I hope he cooks better than he paints.” And sliding down in his chair until he rested upon a more comfortable vertebra, the elegant Barney lit a monogrammed cigarette, and with idle patience swung his bamboo stick.     

       “You're half an hour late, Maggie,” Hunt began at her again in his rumbling voice. “Can't stand for such a waste of my time!”      

       “How about my time?” retorted Maggie, who indeed had a grievance. “I was supposed to have the day off, but instead I had to carry that tray of cigarettes around till the last person in the Ritzmore had finished lunch. Anyhow,” she added, “I don't see that your time's worth so much when you spend it on such painty messes as these.”      

       “It's not up to you to tell me what my time's worth!” retorted Hunt. “I pay you—that's enough for you!... Because you weren't on time, I stuck Old Jimmie out there to finish off this picture. I'll be through with the old cut-throat in ten minutes. Be ready to take his place.”      

       “All right,” said Maggie sulkily.     

       For all his roaring she was not much afraid of the painter. While his brushes flicked at, and streaked across, the canvas she stood idly watching him. He was in paint-smeared, baggy trousers and a soft shirt whose open collar gave a glimpse of a deep chest matted with hair and whose rolled-up sleeves revealed forearms that seemed absurdly large to be fiddling with those slender sticks. A crowbar would have seemed more in harmony. He was unromantically old—all of thirty-five Maggie       guessed; and with his square, rough-hewn face and tousled, reddish hair he was decidedly ugly. But for the fact that he really did work—though of course his work was foolish—and the fact that he paid his way—he bought little, but no one could beat him by so much as a penny in a bargain, not even the Duchess—Maggie might have considered him as one of the many bums who floated purposelessly through that drab region.     

       Also, had there not been so many queer people coming and going in this neighborhood—Eads Howe, the hobo millionaire, settlement workers, people who had grown rich and old in their 

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