“It’s a tough deal,” he remarked abruptly. “—I mean this art stuff. You work like the dickens and kick your heels in ante-rooms. If they take your stuff they send you back to alter it or redraw it. I don’t know how anybody makes a living at it—in the beginning.”
“Don’t you?”
“I? No.” He reddened; but she could not notice it in the moonlight. “No,” he repeated; “I have an allowance from my father. I’m new at it yet.”
“Couldn’t a man—a girl—support herself by drawing 44 pictures for magazines?” she inquired tremulously.
“Oh, well, of course there are some who have arrived—and they manage to get on. Some even make wads, you know.”
“W-wads?” she repeated, mystified.
“I mean a lot of money. There’s that girl on the Star, Jean Throssel, who makes all kinds of wealth, they say, out of her spidery, filmy girls in ringlets and cheesecloth dinner gowns.”
“Oh!”
“Yes, Jean Throssel, and that Waythorne girl, Belinda Waythorne, you know—does all that stuff for The Looking Glass—futurist graft, no mouths on her people—she makes hers, I understand.”
It was rather difficult for Rue to follow him amid the vernacular mazes.