hes, and especially his checkerboard waistcoats"--had been spent
in abusing everything in English art that wasn't three hundred years
old, and going into raptures over Lincoln Cathedral. The more he saw of
Lonnegan the more he was convinced that he had missed his calling. He
might succeed as a floorwalker in a department store, where his airs and
his tailor-made upholstery would impress the hayseeds from the country,
but, as for trying to be--The rest was lost in a gurgle of smothered
laughter, Lonnegan's thin, white fingers having by this time closed over
the painter's windpipe.

My turn came now:

I had been at work a month; had my present quarters at the White Hart
Inn, within a stone's throw of where we lay sprawled with our faces
to the sun--the loveliest inn, by the way, on the Thames, and that was
saying a lot--with hand-polished tables, sleeve and trouser-polished
arm-chairs, Chippendale furniture, barmaids, pewter mugs, old and
new ale, tough bread, tender mutton, tarts--gooseberry and otherwise;
strawberries--two would fill a teacup--and _roses!_ Millions of
roses! "Well, you fellows just step up and look at 'em."

"And not a place to put your head," said Mac.

"How do you know?"

"Been there," replied Lonnegan. "The only decent rooms are reserved
for a bloated American millionaire who arrives to-day--everything else
chock-a-block except two bunks under the roof, full of spiders."

Mac drew up one of his fat legs, stretched his arms, pushed his
slouch hat from his forehead--he was still on his back drinking in the
sunshine--and with a yawn cried:

"They ought to be exterminated."

"The spiders?" grumbled Lonnegan.

"No, millionaires. They throw their money away like water; they crowd
the hotels. Nothing good enough for them. Prices all doubled, everything
slimed up by the trail of their dirty dollars. And the saddest thing in
it all to me is that you generally find one or two able-bodied American
citizens kotowing to them like wooden Chinese mandarins when the great
men take the air."

"Who, for instance?" I asked. No millionaires with any such outfit had
thus far come my way.

"Lonnegan, for one," answered Mac.

The architect raised his head and shot a long, horizontal glance at the
prostrate form of the painter.

"Yes, Lonnegan, I am sorry to say," continued Mac, his eyes fixed on the
yellow greens in the swaying tree-tops.

"I was only polite," protested the architect. "Lambert is a client