There had been cigars
and clothes and dinners and taxi-cabs and all the other trifles which
cost nothing but mount up and make a man wander beyond the bounds of
his legitimate income.
It was borne in upon Kirk, as he reflected upon these things, that the
only evidence he had shown of the possession of the artistic
temperament had been the joyous carelessness of his extravagance. In
that only had he been the artist. It shocked him to think how little
honest work he had done during the past two years. He had lived in a
golden haze into which work had not entered.
He was to be shocked still more very soon.
Stung to action by his thoughts, he embarked upon a sweeping attack on
the stronghold of those who exchange cash for artists' dreams. He
ransacked the studio and set out on his mission in a cab bulging with
large, small, and medium-sized canvases. Like a wave receding from a
breakwater he returned late in the day, a branded failure.
The dealers had eyed his canvases, large, small, and medium-sized, and,
in direct contravention of their professed object in life, had refused
to deal. Only one of them, a man with grimy hands but a moderately
golden heart, after passing a sepia thumb over some of the more
ambitious works, had offered him fifteen dollars for a little sketch
which he had made in an energetic moment of William Bannister crawling
on the floor.
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