"'Baccy?" asked Wetmore, with a hospitable gesture toward the pipes on his mantel.
"No, thank you," said Ludlow.
"Well?"
"Wetmore, what was it you saw in my picture today, when you began with that 'Hello' of yours, and then broke off to say something else?"
"Did I do that? Well, if you really wish to know——"
"I do!"
"I'll tell you. I was going to ask you which of those two girls you had painted it from. The topography was the topography of Miss Maybough, but the landscape was the landscape of Miss Saunders." He waited, as if for Ludlow to speak; then he went on: "I supposed you had been working from some new theory of yours, and I thought I had said about as much on your theories as you would stand for the time."
"Was that all?" Ludlow asked.
"All? It seems to me that's a good deal to be compressed into one small 'hello.'"
Wetmore lighted a pipe, and began to smoke in great comfort. "We were talking, just before you dropped in, of what you may call the psychical chemistry of our kind of shop: the way a fellow transmutes himself into everything he does. I can trace the man himself in every figure he draws or models. You can't get away from yourself, simply because you are always thinking yourself, or through yourself; you can't see or know any one else in any other way."