Hal was always immaculately dressed. Through thick and thin, he had kept his air of purple and fine linen about him. Never a morning without a white flower in his buttonhole; and day after day, his eternally crumpled bright blond hair was all that saved him from the dandiacal. But now! You would have been sorry for him had you found him humped in his counterfeit throne, his cigarette awry on his lip, and his carnation lying all forlorn on the parquet. Had fate allowed him but ten seconds more, he would have set himself right. Too late! Mr. William Saltonstall had just entered the gallery. The ruler of the Court of New Departures had hard work to pull himself together, and recapture his pleasant alertness. It must be done, however; Mr. Saltonstall was too good a client to lose. Hal sprang to his feet, kicked the carnation under the throne, and with it cast aside for the moment his problem of the true and the false in art, as if it were an entangling garment that would burden him in a race....
IV
The next day, Maurice Price, packing up his belongings to return to the city in time for the November elections, was puzzled by a telegram from his helter-skelter cousin. Just what could it mean? In telegrams, if in no other form of composition, the youth resorted to punctuation; he felt that periods gave clearness, an idea he had picked up while doing war work for the Government.
Can sell picture period
Top price cash down period
On condition immediate withdrawal from gallery period
Buyer buyer waits your wire period
Wrayne
As Maurice motored down to the station, the maple and beech leaves spurned by his tires rose up in their passing glory and sang Hal’s message, over and over, with variations; and on the night train, the wheels took up the refrain, with grinding insistence. “Buyer buyer waits your wire,” though probably due in part to a mistake at the office, sounded a little like the new poetry; Maurice hoped there might be truth as well as poetry in it. “Top price cash down” had its own music, of course; but “immediate withdrawal from gallery” was less pleasing to the ear. It had implications. That part of the message, reverberated in the too sonorous breathing of lower nine, just opposite, really annoyed our painter. As he afterward told Hal, adapting his language to his hearer, “it got his goat.” “Immediate withdrawal,” indeed! Such words were not to be addressed to a Price.