"Damn!" muttered Lucas.
He toiled in agitated silence for some minutes, and then burst out again.
"No one will ever exhibit the thing; no one will ever look twice at it; there's not a fool big enough in England to buy it! And it's all but the best bit of work I've ever done."
"That 'all but' lets you down, I suppose," observed the other gently.
"One could fill a lunatic asylum with you alone," replied the painter. "Why don't you go off and do some work instead of exhibiting your incompetence here?"
"I told you I'd a headache," said the young man in the chair languidly.
"What the devil's in your head to ache beats me," declared Lucas, accompanying this unkind speech by a brutal onslaught on the canvas.
"Dear Lucas!" smiled his friend. "You seem to have come under some softening influence lately. Can you be in love?"
The painter turned and confronted him with a less furious air.
"You know I am," he replied, and strode to the end of the studio and back, while the other contemplated him in pitying silence.