"Finished?" asked Mac, passing me a cup of tea.
"Not yet," I replied. "Another thousand words will do it, though."
Mac, in accordance with a vow made in all sincerity, and approved by us, set apart one day a week for etching, just as I was supposed to consecrate some part of my time to literature. At first we were to work together, select themes, write them up and illustrate them conjointly. This, we argued, could not fail to condense into fame and even wealth. Our friend Hooker had done this, and he had climbed to a one-man show in Fifth Avenue. But by some fatality, whenever Mac took a day off for high art, on that day did I invariably feel sordidly industrious. I might idle for a week, smoking too much and getting in Bill's way as she busied herself with housework, but as soon as the etching-press scraped across the studio-floor, or Mac came down with camera and satchel and dressed for a tramp, I became the victim of a mania for work, and stuck childishly to my desk. Personally I did not believe in Hooker's story at all. Hooker's mythical librettist never materialized. I was always on the look-out for a secondhand book containing Hooker's letterpress. It suited the others to believe in him, but even a writer of advertising booklets and "appreciations" has a certain literary instinct that cannot be deceived. And so I felt, as I have said, sordidly industrious and inclined to look disparagingly upon a man who was frittering away his time with absurd scratchings upon copper and whose hands were just then in a most questionable condition.
"I thought you were going to help me," he sneered over his cup.
"The fit was on me," I explained, and my eye roved round the studio. I caught sight of a piece of paper on a chair. Mac made a movement to pick it up, but he was hampered by the cup and saucer, and I secured it.
"Ah—h!" I remarked, and they two regarded each other sheepishly. "Very good indeed, old man!"
And it was very good. With the slap-dash economy of effort which he had learned of Van Roon, when that ill-fated genius was in Chelsea, Mac had caught the salient curves and angles of Mrs. Carville as she stooped over her scaldino, had caught to a surprising degree the sombre expression of her face and the tigerish energy of her crouched body. I studied it with great pleasure for a moment, and then it recurred to me that he had not been with us at the window. I say recurred, though I had known it all along, and my ejaculation, for that matter, was but a sign of triumph over catching him at the same game of peeping-Tom that we had been playing in the room below. Yet so quickly and over-lappingly do our minds work that at the same moment I had no less than three blurred emotions. I was pleased to find my friend was guilty, I was pleased with the sketch, yet puzzled to know how he had come to make it. Suddenly I saw light.
"You were on the stairs?" I said, and pointed with the paper over my shoulder. He nodded.
"Happened to look out," he remarked, setting his cup down.
It is my custom to risk a good deal sometimes by uttering thoughts which my friends are free to disown. They may not be quite honest in this, but none the less, according to the social contract, they are free to disown. So, in this case, when I said, "I wonder if they are really married," both of these generous souls repudiated the suggestion at once.