"If all that don't fetch 'em," said Jared, "what will?"
But the exhibition jury frowned upon this ingenuous offering. Stephen Giles pitied it; Daffingdon Dill, an influential member, and a painter not especially affiliated with the Circuit, derided it cruelly; Abner Joyce himself, when appealed to as a man and a brother by the disappointed farmer-artist, bleakly turned away. Not even the proprietors of the sales-galleries seemed willing to extend a welcome. Jared was puzzled and indignant. Then he bethought himself of the hotels, with their canons and jungles and views along the Canadian Pacific.
"Yes, the hotels—there's where I'll try. That's where you get your public, anyway."
But the hotels were cold. One after another they refused him. Just one was left, and this was so magnificent that he had never even thought of carrying his proposal into it.
He did so now—nothing else was left to do. The clerk was even more magnificent and intimidating than the house, but Jared faced him, and asked for space in which to show his work.
Jared had one of his minor works under his arm—style of painting and style of framing being fully representative of his biggest and best. "It's this kind, only larger," submitted Jared.
The clerk condescended to look, and was interested. He even became affable. His imposing facade was merely for use in the business, and for cloaking the dire fact that, but two short years back, he himself had been a raw country boy from a raw country town. He looked at the picture, and at Jared—his knuckles, his neck-tie, the scalloped hair on his forehead. "Could I have been anything like that?" he thought. He refused consideration to such a calamitous possibility, and became a little more grandly formal as he went on listening to Jared's business.
"Oh, George!" he presently called across his slab of Mexican onyx; "come here."
George came. He was a "drummer": nobody could have supposed for an instant that he was anything else.
"What do you think of this?" The clerk took the picture out of Jared's hands and twirled it round on one corner of its clumsy frame.