“I don’t know,” said Ferris, “it looks like a hopeless case, to me.”
“Oh no it isn’t,” retorted his friend, as cheerfully and confidently as he had promised him that he should not be shot. “Didn’t you bring back any pictures from Venice with you?”
“I brought back a lot of sketches and studies. I’m sorry to say that I loafed a good deal there; I used to feel that I had eternity before me; and I was a theorist and a purist and an idiot generally. There are none of them fit to be seen.”
“Never mind; let’s look at them.”
They hunted out Ferris’s property from a catch-all closet in the studio of a sculptor with whom he had left them, and who expressed a polite pleasure in handing them over to Ferris rather than to his heirs and assigns.
“Well, I’m not sure that I share your satisfaction, old fellow,” said the painter ruefully; but he unpacked the sketches.
Their inspection certainly revealed a disheartening condition of half-work. “And I can’t do anything to help the matter for the present,” groaned Ferris, stopping midway in the business, and making as if to shut the case again.
“Hold on,” said his friend. “What’s this? Why, this isn’t so bad.” It was the study of Don Ippolito as a Venetian priest, which Ferris beheld with a stupid amaze, remembering that he had meant to destroy it, and wondering how it had got where it was, but not really caring much. “It’s worse than you can imagine,” said he, still looking at it with this apathy.
“No matter; I want you to sell it to me. Come!”
“I can’t!” replied Ferris piteously. “It would be flat burglary.”