n you spend it on such painty messes as these."

"It's not up to you to tell me what my time's worth!" retorted Hunt. "I
pay you--that's enough for you!... Because you weren't on time, I stuck
Old Jimmie out there to finish off this picture. I'll be through with
the old cut-throat in ten minutes. Be ready to take his place."

"All right," said Maggie sulkily.

For all his roaring she was not much afraid of the painter. While his
brushes flicked at, and streaked across, the canvas she stood idly
watching him. He was in paint-smeared, baggy trousers and a soft shirt
whose open collar gave a glimpse of a deep chest matted with hair and
whose rolled-up sleeves revealed forearms that seemed absurdly large to
be fiddling with those slender sticks. A crowbar would have seemed
more in harmony. He was unromantically old--all of thirty-five Maggie
guessed; and with his square, rough-hewn face and tousled, reddish hair
he was decidedly ugly. But for the fact that he really did work--though
of course his work was foolish--and the fact that he paid his way--he
bought little, but no one could beat him by so much as a penny in a
bargain, not even the Duchess--Maggie might have considered him as one
of the many bums who floated purposelessly through that drab region.

Also, had there not been so many queer people coming and going in this
neighborhood--Eads Howe, the hobo millionaire, settlement workers,
people who had grown rich and old in their business and preferred to
live near it--Maggie might have regarded Hunt with more curiosity, and
even with suspicion; but down here one accepted queer people as a matter
of course, the only fear being that secretly they might be police or
government agents, which Maggie and the others knew very well Hunt was
not. When Hunt had rented this attic as a studio they had accepted
his explanation that he had taken it because it was cheap and he could
afford to pay no more. Likewise they had accepted his explanation that
he was a mechanic by trade who had roughed it all over the world and
was possessed with an itch for painting, that lately he had worked in
various garages, that it was his habit to hoard his money till he got a
bit ahead and then go off on a painting spree. All these admissions
were indubitably plausible, for his paintings seemed the unmistakable
handiwork of an irresponsible, hard-fisted motor mechanic.

Maggie shifted to her other foot and glanced casually at the canvases
which l