"Hello!" cried the fragile youth who had entered last. "Miss Rosalie March!" He picked up the envelope which Harry had laid down. "Sits the wind in that quarter still, Horatio?"
"The actress, Harry?" cried a second of the trio.
"What actress, you booby? Miss March isn't an actress."
"Nevertheless, she occasionally acts," retorted Sunburst. His yellow beard entitled him to this alias.
"Just the opposite, then, of her brother, Tristram," said the tall, sallow youth addressed as Idler. "He is a sculptor, but he never sculps. Did you see his alto-relievo of a Druid's head in the Art club? Capital study. Why in the deuce doesn't he work?"
"If he did he might get his goods on the market," said Kennedy.
"Out on you for a Philistine, a dunderhead!" cried Harry. "Do you confound genius with salability? Idler could correct you on that point. You remember his satire on 'The Religious Significance of Umbrellas in China?' Was anything ever more daringly conceived, more wittily executed, more—but I spare the shades of Addison and Lamb. And how much did it fetch him? A paltry $15."
Idler was the only one of these well-born good-for-naughts who ever turned his gifts to use. Sketches over the sobriquet by which he was known to his friends occasionally appeared in the lighter magazines.
"But my 'New Broom' made a clean sweep, Harry," he protested.
"Murder," groaned Harry. "He had that in for us. A prepared joke is detestable. It's like bottled spring water."