Philip himself opened the door, and his face showed as warm a pleasure as his guest’s. He was thin and slight almost to emaciation, with keen prominent blue eyes, a sharp-cut nose whose nostrils seemed to sniff like a dog’s, and a short fair moustache. He looked like a medieval ascetic, superficially modernized. Just at present he was in shirt-sleeves and held a pair of compasses in one hand. With the other he shook Stacey’s eagerly.
“By Jove, I’m glad to see you!” he cried. “But why do you give me only a day? Why didn’t you come and stay a week? Come on in!” And he led Stacey down a narrow hall and through the dining-room into his study.
“Couldn’t do it,” Stacey replied on the way. “Whole business so sudden.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” the other assented quietly.
“What you working on?” asked Stacey, leaning over the drawing-board in the study and fumbling abstractedly at the same time with a pile of sketches that lay, curled up anyhow, on a table close-by.
“Public library for a village,” said Blair, pulling a sketch of the front elevation from the rattling heap of papers, spreading it out on the board, and holding it down flat.
Together they leaned over it. Stacey nodded. “Fine!” he said. “Awfully good! Let’s see. It’s not for a New England village. Where is it for? Pennsylvania?”
“Pretty near. Western New York, close to the Pennsylvania line.”
Stacey continued to examine the drawing, then began to smile, poked his finger at it with a wide curving gesture, and finally broke into a frank laugh. “Always the same old Phil!” he said gaily, dropping into an easy chair. “Quite incorrigible! Don’t you ever remember how many shameful ‘Hors Concours’ you were always getting at the Beaux Arts, and how disapprovingly old Fromelles used to shake his head over your projets, and what they all used to think of you: ‘Too bad! Just a little vulgar! Just a little vulgar!’ ”
Blair laughed with him, but after a moment Stacey became suddenly silent and gazed with a puzzled frown at his friend, wondering how it was that any one so physically frail as Blair could possess such creative masculine vigor of mind.