ould earn your living as a moving
picture actor--"

"Adams owes me five thousand dollars for his wife's portrait,"
sputtered Kenny. "But I can't get it. He's been sick for weeks.
Typhoid."

"And in the meantime?"

The shaft went home. Kenny sent for a model--and sent her home.

"She was too ornamental and decidedly sympathetic," he explained
gloomily to Garry. "I'm just in the mood to make a colossal fool of
myself. She was the sort of girl you'd invite to tea to meet your
brother's wife."

"Kenny!"

"She was!" insisted Kenny.

"Any number of models are and you know it. And that girl is Jan's
cousin."

"I make a point of never losing my head over a model," declared Kenny
with an air. "It's a hindrance to work. You concentrate on a type and
every picture you do advertises your devotion. Suppose I married her!"

"Heaven help her!" snapped Garry, and went out, slamming the door.

Kenny offended, followed him home. He felt aggrieved and talkative.

If Kenny had succeeded in propelling himself into one of his nervous
ecstasies of inspiration, thereby normalizing his existence to some
extent, if Reynolds had not appeared and simplified the painter's
credit to a point where he made no further search for unsympathetic
models. Fate, weaving the destiny of two O'Neills, would have changed
her loom. As it was, sick with brooding and pity for himself, Kenny
abandoned all pretense of labor and rushed on blindly to his fate. The
spring was in his blood. What form of midsummer madness lay ahead of
him depended now upon the hairtrigger of impulse. A wind, a sketch,
the perfume of a flower, and he would be off wherever the reminiscence
called him. He whistled constantly. That, as Jan pointed out, was
always a bad sign with Kenny. It meant that he felt perilously
transient and would rocket up in the air when a spark came that pleased
him. He had been much the same, Fahr remembered, the summer he
embarked for Syria upon a tramp steamer--to the captain's frantic
regret.

In the end, feeling absurdly sorry for him, Garry unwittingly sent the
spark in by Pietro.

It was a letter from Brian.

"Tavern of Stars
Open Country
God's Green World of Spring

"Dear Garry:

"The purpose of this letter is primarily a favor. Therefore without
pretense I'll have done with it at once. You'll find in the studio a
scrapbook of clippings which represent my ebullitions in print.
Whitaker wants them, I bel