"Robert won't know the difference," says she, "and it will serve him right. Besides, poor Brooks needs the encouragement."
"Kind of a dub beginner with no backing is he?" says I.
Marjorie describes him different. Accordin' to her, he's a classy comer in the art line, with all kinds of talent up his sleeve and Fame busy just around the corner on a laurel wreath exactly his size. Seems Brooks was from a good fam'ly that had dropped their bundle somewhere along the road; so this art racket that he'd taken up as a time killer he'd had to turn into a steady job. He wa'n't paintin' just to keep his brushes soft. He was out to win the kale.
Between the lines I gathers enough to guess that before she hooked up with Ferdy, the head-achy one, Marjorie had been some mushy over Brooks boy herself. He'd done a full length of her, it appears, and was workin' up quite a portrait trade, when all of a sudden he ups and marries someone else, a rank outsider.
"Too bad!" sighs Marjorie. "It has sadly interfered with his career, I'm afraid."
"Ain't drivin' him to sign work, is it?" says I.
"Goodness, no!" says Marjorie. "Just the opposite. Of course, Edith was a poor girl; but her Uncle Jeff is ever so rich. They live with him, you know. That's the trouble—Uncle Jeff."
She's a little vague about this Uncle Jeff business; but it helps explain why we roll up to a perfectly good marble front detached house just off Riverside Drive, instead of stoppin' at one of them studio rookeries over on Columbus-ave. And even I'm wise to the fact that strugglin' young artists don't have a butler on the door unless there's something like an Uncle Jeff in the fam'ly.
From the dozen or more cars and taxis hung up along the block I judge this must be a regular card affair, with tea and sandwich trimmin's. It's a good guess. A maid tows us up two flights, though, before we're asked to shed anything; and before we lands Marjorie is gaspin' some, for she ain't lost any weight since she collected Ferdy. Quite a studio effect they'd made too, by throwin' a couple of servants' rooms into one and addin' a big skylight. There was the regulation fishnet draped around, and some pieces of tin armor and plaster casts, which proves as well as a court affidavit that here's where the real, sure-fire skookum creative genius holds forth.
It's a giddy bunch of lady gushers that's got together there too, and the soulful chatter is bein' put over so fast it sounds like intermission at a cabaret show. I'm introduced proper to Brooks boy and Wifey; but I'd picked 'em both out at first glimpse. No mistakin' him. He's got on the kind of costume that goes with the fishnet and brass tea machine,—flowin' tie, velvet coat, baggy trousers, and all, even to the Vandyke beard. It's kind of a pale, mud-colored set of face alfalfa; but, then, Brooks boy is sort of that kind himself—that is, all but his eyes. They're a wide-set, dreamy, baby-blue pair of lamps, that beams mild and good-natured on everyone.