contests
where he was bound to be worsted, and that for Nicky pride did not exist
in comparison with the luxury of spreading himself and his feelings over
the widest possible area with the greatest possible noise, made the
difference between them so marked that Ishmael could see nothing else.
Nicky had inherited from older sources, he reflected, a flamboyance such
as Vassie and Archelaus and, in his underhand way, even Tom possessed,
but that had missed himself.

Killigrew and the others were coming over to supper, and the Parson also
was expected. Ishmael judged that Nicky had had enough excitement for
one day, and so, though not as any further punishment, sent him to bed
with a supper-tray instead of letting him come down. He recounted the
afternoon's happenings at supper and confessed himself hopelessly
puzzled.

"I don't understand the workings of his mind," he admitted; "when I took
him up his supper he seemed quite different from the half-an-hour
earlier when I'd been up. He'd--it's difficult to describe it--but it
was as though he'd adjusted the whole incident in his own mind to what
he wanted it to be. He greeted me with a sort of forgiving and yet
chastened dignity that made me nearly howl with laughter. He sat up
there in his bed as though he were upon a throne and expecting me to beg
for pardon, or, rather, as though he knew I wouldn't, but he had the
happy consciousness that I ought to. It was confoundingly annoying. I
asked him whether he wanted to see Miss Barlow to say good-night--you
know the passionate devotion he's had for her of late--and all he said
was, 'No, thank you; he didn't think he could trust himself to speak to
her just yet!' I said, 'Don't be a little idiot,' and he only smiled in
a long-suffering manner, and I came away feeling squashed by my own
small son."

"He sounds as though he were going to suffer from what is called the
artistic temperament," observed the Parson.

"Let's hope not," chimed in Killigrew, "because the so-called artistic
temperament is never found among the people who do things, but only in
the lookers-on. The actual creators don't suffer from it."

"It depends what one means by the artistic temperament," said Judy
rather soberly. "If you mean the untidy emotional sort of people who
excuse everything by saying they have the artistic temperament, I agree
with you. That's what the Philistine thinks it is, of course."

"Oh, the real thing, the thing that creates, i