ell,
I'm glad. I thought they'd like it."

Eugene could have cried. Poor Shotmeyer! He wasn't a good artist, but he
had a good heart. He would never forget him.

CHAPTER XVII

This one significant sale with its subsequent check of seventy-five
dollars and later the appearance of the picture in color, gave Eugene
such a lift in spirit that he felt, for the time being, as though his
art career had reached a substantial basis, and he began to think of
going to Blackwood to visit Angela. But first he must do some more work.

He concentrated his attention on several additional scenes, doing a view
of Greeley Square in a sopping drizzle, and a picture of an L train
speeding up the Bowery on its high, thin trestle of steel. He had an eye
for contrasts, picking out lights and shadows sharply, making wonderful
blurs that were like colors in precious stones, confused and suggestive.
He took one of these after a month to _Truth_, and again the Art
Director was his victim. He tried to be indifferent, but it was hard.
The young man had something that he wanted.

"You might show me anything else you do in this line," he said. "I can
use a few if they come up to these two."

Eugene went away with his head in the air. He was beginning to get the
courage of his ability.

It takes quite a number of drawings at seventy-five and one hundred
dollars each to make a living income, and artists were too numerous to
make anyone's opportunity for immediate distinction easy. Eugene waited
months to see his first drawing come out. He stayed away from the
smaller magazines in the hope that he would soon be able to contribute
to the larger ones, but they were not eagerly seeking new artists. He
met, through Shotmeyer, two artists who were living in one studio in
Waverly Place and took a great liking to them. One of them, McHugh, was
an importation from Wyoming with delicious stories of mountain farming
and mining; the other, Smite, was a fisher lad from Nova Scotia. McHugh,
tall and lean, with a face that looked like that of a raw yokel, but
with some gleam of humor and insight in the eyes which redeemed it
instantly, was Eugene's first choice of a pleasing, genial personality.
Joseph Smite had a sense of the sea about him. He was short and stout,
and rather solidly put together, like a blacksmith. He had big hands and
feet, a big mouth, big, bony eye sockets and coarse brown hair. When he
talked, ordinarily, it was with a slow, halti