“Not many,” I said. “I should not be a poor man if commissions for life-size portraits often fell in my way.”
“You poor!” exclaimed Mr. Boxsious, contemptuously. “I dispute that point with you at the outset. Why, you’ve got a good cloth coat, a clean shirt, and a smooth-shaved chin. You’ve got the sleek look of a man who has slept between sheets and had his breakfast. You can’t humbug me about poverty, for I know what it is. Poverty means looking like a scarecrow, feeling like a scarecrow, and getting treated like a scarecrow. That was my luck, let me tell you, when I first thought of trying the law. Poverty, indeed! Do you shake in your shoes, Mr. Artist, when you think what you were at twenty? I do, I can promise you.”
He began to shift about so irritably in his chair, that, in the interests of my work, I was obliged to make an effort to calm him.
“It must be a pleasant occupation for you in your present prosperity,” said I, “to look back sometimes at the gradual processes by which you passed from poverty to competence, and from that to the wealth you now enjoy.”
“Gradual, did you say?” cried Mr. Boxsious; “it wasn’t gradual at all. I was sharp—damned sharp, and I jumped at my first start in business slap into five hundred pounds in one day.”
“That was an extraordinary step in advance,” I rejoined. “I suppose you contrived to make some profitable investment—”
“Not a bit of it! I hadn’t a spare sixpence to invest with. I won the money by my brains, my hands, and my pluck; and, what’s more, I’m proud of having done it. That was rather a curious case, Mr. Artist. Some men might be shy of mentioning it; I never was shy in my life and I mention it right and left everywhere—the whole case, just as it happened, except the names. Catch me ever committing myself to mentioning names! Mum’s the word, sir, with yours to command, Thomas Boxsious.”
“As you mention ‘the case’ everywhere,” said I, “perhaps you would not be offended with me if I told you I should like to hear it?”
“Man alive! haven’t I told you already that I can’t be offended? And didn’t I say a moment ago that I was proud of the case? I’ll tell you, Mr. Artist—but stop! I’ve got the interests of the Town Council to look after in this business. Can you paint as well when I’m talking as when I’m not? Don’t sneer, sir; you’re not wanted to sneer—you’re wanted to give an answer—yes or no?”
“Yes, then,” I replied, in his own sharp way. “I can always paint the better when I am hearing an interesting story.”