“Hello, there!” grumbled Dick, entering. “Why didn't you answer a shipmate's hail?”
“I heard you; but just then I was adding a column of figures, and I knew you'd look in.”
At that moment Larry noted the portrait of Maggie, looking up from the chair beside him. With a swiftness which he tried to disguise into a mechanical action, he seized the painting and rolled it up, face inside.
“What's that you've got?” demanded Dick.
“Just a little daub of my own.”
“So you paint, too. What else can you do? Let's have a look.”
“It's too rotten. I'd rather let you see something else—though all my stuff is bad.”
“You wouldn't do any little thing, would you, to brighten this tiredest hour in the day of a tired business man,” complained Dick. “I've really been a business man to-day, Captain. Worked like the devil—or an angel—whichever works the harder.”
He lit a cigarette and settled with a sigh on the corner of Larry's desk. Larry regarded him with a stranger and more contradicting mixture of feelings than he had ever thought to contain: solicitude for Dick—jealousy of him—and the instinct to protect Maggie. This last seemed to Larry grotesquely absurd the instant it seethed up in him, but there the instinct was: was Dick treating Maggie right?
“How was the show last night, Dick?”