“Don't worry; it keeps one's hand in—specially when you begin without the pencil.” He set to work rapidly. “That's Nelson's Column. Presently the Nilghai will appear shinning up it.”
“Give him some clothes this time.”
“Certainly—a veil and an orange-wreath, because he's been married.”
“Gad, that's clever enough!” said Torpenhow over his shoulder, as Dick brought out of the paper with three twirls of the brush a very fat back and labouring shoulder pressed against stone.
“Just imagine,” Dick continued, “if we could publish a few of these dear little things every time the Nilghai subsidises a man who can write, to give the public an honest opinion of my pictures.”
“Well, you'll admit I always tell you when I have done anything of that kind. I know I can't hammer you as you ought to be hammered, so I give the job to another. Young Maclagan, for instance——”
“No-o—one half-minute, old man; stick your hand out against the dark of the wall-paper—you only burble and call me names. That left shoulder's out of drawing. I must literally throw a veil over that. Where's my pen-knife? Well, what about Maclagan?”
“I only gave him his riding-orders to—to lambast you on general principles for not producing work that will last.”
“Whereupon that young fool,”—Dick threw back his head and shut one eye as he shifted the page under his hand,—“being left alone with an ink-pot and what he conceived were his own notions, went and spilt them both over me in the papers. You might have engaged a grown man for the business, Nilghai. How do you think the bridal veil looks now, Torp?”
“How the deuce do three dabs and two scratches make the stuff stand away from the body as it does?” said Torpenhow, to whom Dick's methods were always new.