"Nothing," said the young man, sullenly, his thin fingers beginning to pluck at his face. "I've just started again. I've been ... ill. I suppose Daragh's told you—about me?"
"Yes," said Jane, easily, "he's told me everything, I think, but what I'm interested in now is—what are you going to do with this stuff?"
"I don't know," he said, slackly. "It depends on how I feel. Some days"—his eyes shifted and fled before her gaze—"well, you know how it is yourself with your own work,—when you're in the mood—when you have an inspiration——"
"I don't know anything about that sort of piffle," said his guest, severely. "It's my mood to beat my poet's piano four solid hours a day, and I shouldn't know an inspiration if I met one in my mush bowl!"
He produced a nervous laugh. "Ah,—but you have your market! You're there! There's the urge—the spur——"
She looked from the crisp and living lines of his pictures to his dead, young flesh, to his fingers, locked together and straining, to keep them from their telltale plucking. "Look here," she said, "why shouldn't we do something together?"
"We—togeth—" he sat down limply on the end of his bed-couch, staring, and she heard Michael's quickened breath behind her.
"Yes! Let's try a calendar of New York. I've always had one in the attic of my mind. Twelve pictures, you know, with bits of verse, of prose,—sketches like these of yours here. There are several which would do just as they stand. This sort of thing, you know, but balanced—Grand Street pushcarts and a group of girls going into Lucy-Gertrude's on Fifth Avenue."
"I get you," he cried, jumping to his feet. "Colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady——"
"But no propaganda!"