“Lots of fellows either throw them out as rubbish or give them away,” David protested.
“Yes, but yours are so lovely, David! I can’t think that most men would make such nice ones. This little one—I’ll tell you what it’s like,” said Gay, with a brightening face, “It’s like a little Diziani in the Louvre!”
These little touches of familiarity with the field so infinitely interesting to him were delightful to David. He would spend whole winter afternoons going over his European catalogues with her and identifying picture after picture. Gay made him mark the “notes” at a hundred dollars each.
“Catalogue them separately under ‘notes,’” she suggested one morning, “and then let’s give each one of them a name.” And following some line of thought she presently added dreamily, “David, does the money part matter so tremendously to you?”
“Does—God bless the child!” answered David, with a glance toward the sketches he was assorting in the big upstairs room in which he worked at Wastewater. “Of course it does!”
Gay, who had been making some little sketches herself on a large bare block with a very sharp pencil, laughed at his tone. Outside a January rain was sleeting roughly against the windows, the casements rattled. A small oil stove was burning in the cool gray daylight of the room, the air was faintly scented with the odour of kerosene and hot metal.
“Why, what would you do if you had more money?” Gay asked.
“Oh, Lord——!” David began. “Well, I’d take a studio near Rucker’s,” he began. “At least, I might. And probably about once in every three years I’d go across and study in Europe. I’d buy one of Neil Boone’s pictures to-morrow,” went on David, warming suddenly, “and I’d buy one every three months, to keep the poor fellow from committing suicide before people begin to find out what a marvel he is.”
“Is he so clever, David?”
“Oh——” David said, briefly, almost impatiently. “The uses of adversity are sweet, Gay,” he added, working busily with an eraser on a smudged pencil sketch, “but Boone has had a little too much of a good thing! He idolized his wife, and she died, and I think he feels that it might have been different if she’d had less want and care. He’s mad about his kid, and a well-to-do sister has him in Washington. Boone can’t afford to keep him.”