"Well, but don't you think you'd better go and see him yourself now? He's too big a bug to run after people. That kind of thing don't come every day, you know; you might lose it. Why, he lives right near you in that swell house across the Square."
"Oh, I know him very well," said Oliver, nodding his head. "No, let him come to-morrow to me; it won't hurt him to walk up three flights of stairs. I'm busy to-day. Now I think of it, there's one thing, though, you CAN tell him, and please be particular about it—there will be no advance over my regular price. I don't care to compete with her ladyship."
Without waiting to hear the dealer's protest he stepped outside the shop and joined the crowd about the window, elbowing each other for a better view of the portrait. No one recognized him. He was too obscure for that. They might after this, he thought with an exultant throb, and a flush of pride crossed his face.
As he walked down Broadway a sense of the humor of the whole situation came over him. Here for years he had been working day and night; running the gauntlet of successive juries and hanging committees, with his best things rejected or skied until his Tam-o'-Shanter girl made a hit; worrying, hoping against hope, racking his brain as to how and when and where he would find the path which would lead him to commercial success—a difficult task for one too proud to beg for favors and too independent to seek another's aid—and here, out of the clear sky, had come this audacious Bohemienne, the pet of foyer and studio—a woman who presented the greatest number of contrasts to the things he held most dear in womankind—and with a single stroke had cleared the way to success for him. And this, too, not from any love of him, nor his work, nor his future, but simply to settle a board-bill or pay for a bonnet.
Again Oliver laughed, this time so loudly that the man in front turned and looked at him.
"A cracking price," he kept repeating to himself, "a cracking price, eh? and out of old Peter Fish! Went fishing for minnows and hooked a whale, and another little fish for me! I wonder what she baited her hook with. That woman's a genius."
Suddenly he caught sight of the sign of a Long Island florist set up in an apothecary's window between the big green and red glass globes that lined its sides.
Turning on his heel he entered the door.
"Pick me out a dozen red japonicas," he said to the boy behind the counter.
Oliver waited until each short-stemmed blossom was carefully selected, laid on its bed of raw cotton, blanketed with the same covering, and packed in a paper box. Then, taking a card from his pocket, he wrote upon its back: "Most grateful thanks for my share of the catch," slipped it into an envelope, addressed it to "The fair Fisher, The Countess Kovalski," and, with a grim smile on his face, kept on down Broadway toward the dingy hotel, the resort of all the Southerners of the time, to arrange for rooms for his father and Nathan Gill.