thing I couldn't put my hands on. If I touch it, I accept it,
and if it's willing I'm able.

"Jim!" said Willy, grabbing my hat. "Come in, come in!"

I grinned at the little guy assuringly and shook the rain from my coat
and tossed it on an easel. He shunted a chair at me and seated himself
nervously, rubbing his neck, on the other side of a monster coffee table
loaded with paints, bottles and oil-stained cartons. I was familiar with
this studio, the working half of Willy's ranch-style chalet. The studio
itself was as big as a barn and had more windows than walls; rain pecked
at the glass in the northerly-exposed roof.

Willy was tidy for an artist. Most of the boys on the agency's hook have
la Boheme delusions that class them apart from us hucksters; their
studios, which we see in spite of ourselves, _look_ like barns. But
Willy's neuroses, although conventional, were bearable because in a lot
of ways he was practical. He kept things where he could put his hands on
them. Like the cigarettes he now fished from a box on the coffee table
labeled 'caseins'.

I shifted uncomfortably; these new-fangled chairs they twist out of wire
will never replace the Morris. Willy drew furiously on the fag he had
forgotten to offer me. It was taking him longer than usual to warm up to
his subject. I shifted again.

"What's the problem, Willy?" I asked.

He jumped, then looked at me with his scared-spaniel eyes, butted his
smoke and reached for another. Just watching him was giving me the
heebies, but I flashed my old fairy godmom smile.

"Jim," he said finally, "I called you because, well, you're a practical
guy and can face things in a practical way. I've got to tell _somebody_
about it. I'm--it's driving me crazy, Jim."

I stifled a yawn and fixed my smile and found my mind wandering back to
the lady's earlobes. Now I'm not against a guy letting down his hair,
but I was sure that with Willy it couldn't possibly amount to anymore
than another fruitless crush on a model. He had them frequently, but
they always fizzled out before the girl got around to compromising him.
He was always a foot short of them, but he had money; the usual solution
was little more than another illo assignment which required a horsey
model of another color. I'd begun to suspect that the cause of neuroses
in little artists like Willy was too many here-now gone-tomorrow
beautiful babes. Transference, or something like that. It makes them so
dizzy they forg