in Trafalgar Square. That's it. They came from the ends of the
earth to attend Nilghai's wedding to an English bride. This shall be an
epic. It's a sweet material to work with.'

'It's a scandalous waste of time,' said Torpenhow.

'Don't worry; it keeps one's hand in--specially when you begin without
the pencil.' He set to work rapidly. 'That's Nelson's Column. Presently
the Nilghai will appear shinning up it.'

'Give him some clothes this time.'

'Certainly--a veil and an orange-wreath, because he's been married.'

'Gad, that's clever enough!' said Torpenhow over his shoulder, as Dick
brought out of the paper with three twirls of the brush a very fat back
and labouring shoulder pressed against stone.

'Just imagine,' Dick continued, 'if we could publish a few of these dear
little things every time the Nilghai subsidises a man who can write, to
give the public an honest opinion of my pictures.'

'Well, you'll admit I always tell you when I have done anything of that
kind. I know I can't hammer you as you ought to be hammered, so I give
the job to another. Young Maclagan, for instance----'

'No-o--one half-minute, old man; stick your hand out against the dark of
the wall-paper--you only burble and call me names. That left shoulder's
out of drawing. I must literally throw a veil over that. Where's my
pen-knife? Well, what about Maclagan?'

'I only gave him his riding-orders to--to lambast you on general
principles for not producing work that will last.'

'Whereupon that young fool,'--Dick threw back his head and shut one
eye as he shifted the page under his hand,--'being left alone with an
ink-pot and what he conceived were his own notions, went and spilt them
both over me in the papers. You might have engaged a grown man for the
business, Nilghai. How do you think the bridal veil looks now, Torp?'

'How the deuce do three dabs and two scratches make the stuff stand away
from the body as it does?' said Torpenhow, to whom Dick's methods were
always new.

'It just depends on where you put 'em. If Maclagan had know that much
about his business he might have done better.'

'Why don't you put the damned dabs into something that will stay, then?'
insisted the Nilghai, who had really taken considerable trouble in
hiring for Dick's benefit the pen of a young gentleman who devoted most
of his waking hours to an anxious consideration of the aims and ends of
Art, which, he wrote, was one and indivisible.

'Wait a min