I stopped to admire a Fuller landscape.
“Aren’t those shadows lovely?” I said.
“My living room is going to be very bright,” said Hosmer Appleby. “Splotches of brilliant color everywhere. Old Spanish.” He said this in a confidential whisper, as if he were imparting a secret. “And, do you know,” he concluded, “I’ve earned almost enough to furnish the living room.”
I congratulated him. He shook a rather woeful head.
“It’s fearfully slow work,” he said. “Sometimes I think I’ll never make it. Sometimes I fear that the house is a mirage that can never be reached. But I conquer these fits of despair; I put on full steam and sell dolls like a fiend incarnate.” He made a face. “Little bores,” he added. We had reached the front door of the museum.
“Well, good-by,” Appleby said. “Glad I saw you. Let’s have lunch sometime. Have to go back downtown and cable Peru. Just dropped in here to try that Napoleonic bed. Now I can cross canopied beds off my list.” He did so.
Then I saw him make a hasty exit, and I saw his brown-suited back disappear in pursuit of a bus.
We never did have that lunch; he disappeared from my life and it was some years before I saw him again. It was at an auction. I heard an excited tenor voice bidding on a dragon-sprinkled Chinese rug.
Appleby shook hands with me vigorously, without taking his eyes off the auctioneer. He seemed in excellent health and spirits; he had color in his cheeks and a spark in his eyes. He bought the rug.
“This makes the seventh rug I’ve bought,” he whispered to me breathlessly.