the
latter until after Wheeler had had time to tell her. This also chagrined
her, for she felt in this as she had about his marriage, that he was
purposely neglecting her.

The dream finally materialized--a room eighteen by forty, hung with dark
red velvet, irradiated with a soft, illuminating glow from hidden lamps
in which Eugene's pictures stood forth in all their rawness and
reality--almost as vigorous as life itself. To some people, those who do
not see life clearly and directly, but only through other people's eyes,
they seemed more so.

For this reason Eugene's exhibition of pictures was an astonishing thing
to most of those who saw it. It concerned phases of life which in the
main they had but casually glanced at, things which because they were
commonplace and customary were supposedly beyond the pale of artistic
significance. One picture in particular, a great hulking, ungainly
negro, a positively animal man, his ears thick and projecting, his lips
fat, his nose flat, his cheek bones prominent, his whole body expressing
brute strength and animal indifference to dirt and cold, illustrated
this point particularly. He was standing in a cheap, commonplace East
Side street. The time evidently was a January or February morning. His
business was driving an ash cart, and his occupation at the moment
illustrated by the picture was that of lifting a great can of mixed
ashes, paper and garbage to the edge of the ungainly iron wagon. His
hands were immense and were covered with great red patched woolen and
leather gloves--dirty, bulbous, inconvenient, one would have said. His
head and ears were swaddled about by a red flannel shawl or strip of
cloth which was knotted under his pugnacious chin, and his forehead,
shawl and all, surmounted by a brown canvas cap with his badge and
number as a garbage driver on it. About his waist was tied a great piece
of rough coffee sacking and his arms and legs looked as though he might
have on two or three pairs of trousers and as many vests. He was looking
purblindly down the shabby street, its hard crisp snow littered with tin
cans, paper, bits of slop and offal. Dust--gray ash dust, was flying
from his upturned can. In the distance behind him was a milk wagon, a
few pedestrians, a little thinly clad girl coming out of a delicatessen
store. Over head were dull small-paned windows, some shutters with a few
of their slats broken out, a frowsy headed man looking out evidently to
see whet