“What is loose mit Zephine?” demanded he.
Nothing was loose with Zephine—except her painting, as it ought to be. Her picture, as a matter of fact, was very decent—some children, sketchily but becomingly dressed in splashes of sunlight, in an orchard. Zephine had been painting pink infants in sunshiny orchards ever since I first knew her in darkest Greenwich Village—when she could get hold of the orchard or the infant—and this was quite the best of the lot. But I could only gibber like an imbecile and wipe my streaming eyes.
Nick gave me up as a bad job. He proceeded to examine the picture. He looked at it from one side, he looked at it from the other side, he poked his nose into it to see how it was painted, he cocked his eye at it from across the room. Finally he came back to me.
“You can have delirium tremens till you’re black in the face, if you choose,” he announced, “but I like Zephine. I’m going to buy her.”
“I wish you would,” I managed to hiccough. “She deserves it.”
“But why do you go on about her like a demented cockatoo?”
“It’s only her—her clothes!” I snorted, going off again.
Nick went off too—to the Secretary’s office. And he presently returned, brandishing a receipt at me.
“There now! She’s mine and I shall stand up for her!” he exclaimed. “Why, species of a beast, do you make fun of a sister brush’s clothes?”
“I don’t make fun of them,” I retorted. “I always admired them very much. Only——” I had to stuff my handkerchief into my mouth lest my inept cachinnations profane anew the decorous shades of the National Academy of Design.