Daffingdon recalled the sensuous Oriental masterpiece at the club and saw no reason why the possessor of such a particular talent could be expected to succeed in a bank. He shook his head; no member of another sect—no heretical Viennese—should share his martyrdom with him. This left Prochnow free to rush upon the lions on his own account. Little O'Grady, returning to the Rabbit-Hutch, found his neighbour's loins fully girded for the task—the fine frenzy of inspiration had already turned the place upside down.
"That's right, Ignace!" he called from the threshold; "sail in. What is the plan this time?" he asked, tiptoeing along over the scattered sheets that littered the floor.
Prochnow ran his nervous fingers through his wild black forelock, and cast on Little O'Grady a piercing, inspirational glance from a pair of glittering eyes.
"The two great modern forces," he pronounced, "are Science and Democracy. I shall show how each has contributed to the progress of society. Science shall have the six lunettes on the right and Democracy the six on the left."
"H'm," said Little O'Grady; "an allegory?"
"Precisely. No better basis for a grand monumental work."
"Well, Ignace," declared Little O'Grady, "you'll put it through if anybody can!"
He hurried back to his own room, shrugged himself into his plaster-flecked blouse of robin's-egg blue, threw "The First Issue of Wild-Cat Currency" (a group of frontier financiers in chokers and high beaver hats) back into the clay-box, and began at once on a bold relief of "Science and Democracy Opening the Way for the Car of Progress."
"Science," he explained to Prochnow, next day, "will be clearing the air of the bats of ignorance, and Democracy will be clearing the ground of the imps of aristocracy—or maybe they'll be demons. And between the two, right in the middle, of course, the Car of Progress will advance in very low relief. I haven't quite got it all where it will pull together yet, and I can see the foreshortening of the horses will be something terrible; but I'm pretty sure I shall find some way out within a week or so. Let me tell you one thing, though, about your own job, Ignace. Your allegory will go down easier if——Say, you wouldn't take Hill's hints, would you?"
"No," said Prochnow, with the loftiest contempt.