By the end of the month Joan's work day was full and he was seeing her less than he had, save at night. Garry begged her to pose for him, carried his case to Kenny and met with blank refusal.
"I'm sorry, old man," Kenny finished inexorably, "but nothing under forty need apply. You, my son, are particularly flighty and fickle. Just now you happen to be raving about Peggy, but every pretty face, I've noticed, makes you forget the one before."
And Garry, who had been trying to marry Peggy for a year and was by no means as uncertain and mercurial in his affections as Kenny would have him believe, stared with eyes intelligent and reminiscent.
"Well," he said softly, "I'll be jiggered. That's the limit!"
"Be jiggered!" Kenny told him shortly. "And have done with it."
Garry raised his eyebrows and departed. And Kenny, reverting to one of his old frantic minutes, walked the floor. He had accepted portrait commissions that would keep him busy for months; for the ragged money he had hidden in the fireplace had made his need of work imperative. Otherwise he himself could have painted Joan in the gold brocade and in all the others.
What had the money in the fireplace done for him? It had doomed him to work apart while other men painted the golden shadows in her hair.
March came to Kenny and found his studio with its haunting odor of coffee and cigarettes, his brushes, his head and his heart, furiously at work. He was giving himself up to love and labor with a Celtic intensity that Garry found appalling. He planned endlessly to one purpose: Joan's happiness, Joan's pleasure, Joan's future with him. The memory of the ragged money laid aside for Don he dismissed with a wry smile, gritting his teeth. What mattered in the face of the splendid fact that he was so joyously, so recklessly, so absurdly happy?
His life, with its deadly singleness of purpose, should have been simple. It attained a complexity at times at which he marveled. An inclination to blurt out the truth with panicky abruptness when he wanted to lie, plunged him into more than one predicament.
"I'm always explaining to somebody," he complained bitterly to Garry, "why I tell the truth--"
"You told Kenneth his dancing urchin was rotten--"