On the way home from Madame Morny's in a taxi, for the snow had become a blizzard, he made one final desperate effort to break her resolution. It was futile. Again she was passionately eager to please him. Again he found it a problem that involved her happiness and peace of mind. Again, with his heart sore, be kissed her and surrendered to her wishes with a sigh.
But he found the work for her himself with the older painters.
"Kenny, I'm so glad you asked me to bring mother's trunks with me," Joan told him. "Aranyi has asked me to pose in the gold brocade."
Something sharp stabbed at Kenny's heart.
"I meant them," he said with a sigh, "for costume dances, but Aranyi paints the texture of things with marvelous skill."
By the end of the month Joan's work day was full and he was seeing her less than he had, save at night. Garry begged her to pose for him, carried his case to Kenny and met with blank refusal.
"I'm sorry, old man," Kenny finished inexorably, "but nothing under forty need apply. You, my son, are particularly flighty and fickle. Just now you happen to be raving about Peggy, but every pretty face, I've noticed, makes you forget the one before."
And Garry, who had been trying to marry Peggy for a year and was by no means as uncertain and mercurial in his affections as Kenny would have him believe, stared with eyes intelligent and reminiscent.
"Well," he said softly, "I'll be jiggered. That's the limit!"
"Be jiggered!" Kenny told him shortly. "And have done with it."