place, as it
might very well have been; he sympathized with himself in view of the
possibility; and for once they were mistaken who thought him indifferent
and merely brutal in his failure to appear at Lindau's obsequies.

He would really have gone if he had known how to reconcile his presence
in that house with the terms of his effective banishment from it; and
he was rather forgivingly finding himself wronged in the situation, when
Dryfoos knocked at the studio door the morning after Lindau's funeral.
Beaton roared out, "Come in!" as he always did to a knock if he had not
a model; if he had a model he set the door slightly ajar, and with his
palette on his thumb frowned at his visitor and told him he could
not come in. Dryfoos fumbled about for the knob in the dim passageway
outside, and Beaton, who had experience of people's difficulties with
it, suddenly jerked the door open. The two men stood confronted, and at
first sight of each other their quiescent dislike revived. Each
would have been willing to turn away from the other, but that was not
possible. Beaton snorted some sort of inarticulate salutation, which
Dryfoos did not try to return; he asked if he could see him alone for
a minute or two, and Beaton bade him come in, and swept some
paint-blotched rags from the chair which he told him to take. He
noticed, as the old man sank tremulously into it, that his movement
was like that of his own father, and also that he looked very much
like Christine. Dryfoos folded his hands tremulously on the top of his
horn-handled stick, and he was rather finely haggard, with the dark
hollows round his black eyes and the fall of the muscles on either side
of his chin. He had forgotten to take his soft, wide-brimmed hat off;
and Beaton felt a desire to sketch him just as he sat.

Dryfoos suddenly pulled himself together from the dreary absence into
which he fell at first. "Young man," he began, "maybe I've come here on
a fool's errand," and Beaton rather fancied that beginning.

But it embarrassed him a little, and he said, with a shy glance aside,
"I don't know what you mean." "I reckon," Dryfoos answered, quietly,
"you got your notion, though. I set that woman on to speak to you the
way she done. But if there was anything wrong in the way she spoke, or
if you didn't feel like she had any right to question you up as if we
suspected you of anything mean, I want you to say so."

Beaton said nothing, and the old man went on.