me, because they had got an oppressive foothold, but because in
their really pathetic decorum and mysteriously permanent newness
they counted on me so intensely. I was therefore very glad when
Jack Hawley came home: he was always of such good counsel. He
painted badly himself, but there was no one like him for putting
his finger on the place. He had been absent from England for a
year; he had been somewhere--I don't remember where--to get a fresh
eye. I was in a good deal of dread of any such organ, but we were
old friends; he had been away for months and a sense of emptiness
was creeping into my life. I hadn't dodged a missile for a year.

He came back with a fresh eye, but with the same old black velvet
blouse, and the first evening he spent in my studio we smoked
cigarettes till the small hours. He had done no work himself, he
had only got the eye; so the field was clear for the production of
my little things. He wanted to see what I had produced for the
Cheapside, but he was disappointed in the exhibition. That at
least seemed the meaning of two or three comprehensive groans
which, as he lounged on my big divan, his leg folded under him,
looking at my latest drawings, issued from his lips with the smoke
of the cigarette.

"What's the matter with you?" I asked.

"What's the matter with you?"

"Nothing save that I'm mystified."

"You are indeed. You're quite off the hinge. What's the meaning
of this new fad?" And he tossed me, with visible irreverence, a