"Don't you mind 'em a bit, my boy. You just go ahead, and you'll come out at the top of the tree."
"I'll do my best," said Wyndham, smiling.
"That'll be good enough, I guess," said Sadler. "Perhaps this portrait will open up other things for you."
"How so?" inquired Wyndham.
"It all depends on the crowd you strike—I heard you came a bit of a cropper, and I daresay you're not too well off now to despise a job or two—you can always put decent work into them. Now there's Jim Harley—he struck a rich middle-class lot ten years ago, rotten out-and-out Philistines, twenty guineas apiece—and they've been keeping him going ever since. Does fifty of 'em a year."
"The prospect hardly tempts me. After all, the main thing is to get back to big work."
Sadler smiled. "I guess I should be the first to drag you back again—after a while. But Jimmy married young. A boy and girl affair. His wife's family weren't satisfied with his financial position, and there was a mighty row at the time. Of course the girl had only her pretty eyes."
"Ah, you don't approve of idealistic love affairs."
"Not of that kind. I'm forty, and I've seen something in my time."
Wyndham had finished his purchases, and was telling the assistant to send the parcel to his studio. As they left the shop presently, Sadler pressed Wyndham very hard to lunch with him at a particular restaurant he mentioned, and Wyndham could not do otherwise than accept the invitation, though he confessed the place was unknown to him. Whereat Sadler expressed great astonishment. It was one of the very few places in London where the food was fit to eat! Why, the cooking was even better than at Lavenue's in the Quarter, and that was saying a great deal. He, Sadler, could not endure any other place during his sojournings in London. Wyndham let the dear fellow gallop on to his heart's content. Sadler was a fine painter, and in the old days Wyndham as the junior had sat at his feet, and in the matter of technique had been greatly indebted to him. But he had observed with covert amusement at a very early stage in the acquaintanceship that Sadler, like so many others in the hard-working, hand-to-mouth world of the arts, had an amiable weakness for "being in the know" anent the good things of life, and affected a lavishness in public that was off-set by a sharp economy in the less visible phases of his existence.