f whose work did it remind him--anybody's?
He confessed to himself as he stirred around among his numerous art
memories that he recalled nothing exactly like it. Raw reds, raw greens,
dirty grey paving stones--such faces! Why this thing fairly shouted its
facts. It seemed to say: "I'm dirty, I am commonplace, I am grim, I am
shabby, but I am life." And there was no apologizing for anything in it,
no glossing anything over. Bang! Smash! Crack! came the facts one after
another, with a bitter, brutal insistence on their so-ness. Why, on
moody days when he had felt sour and depressed he had seen somewhere a
street that looked like this, and there it was--dirty, sad, slovenly,
immoral, drunken--anything, everything, but here it was. "Thank God for
a realist," he said to himself as he looked, for he knew life, this cold
connoisseur; but he made no sign. He looked at the tall, slim frame of
Eugene, his cheeks slightly sunken, his eyes bright--an artist every
inch of him, and then at Angela, small, eager, a sweet, loving, little
woman, and he was glad that he was going to be able to say that he would
exhibit these things.

"Well," he said, pretending to look at the picture on the easel for the
first time, "we might as well begin to look at these things. I see you
have one here. Very good, I think, quite forceful. What others have
you?"

Eugene was afraid this one hadn't appealed to him as much as he hoped it
would, and set it aside quickly, picking up the second in the stock
which stood against the wall, covered by a green curtain. It was the
three engines entering the great freight yard abreast, the smoke of the
engines towering straight up like tall whitish-grey plumes, in the damp,
cold air, the sky lowering with blackish-grey clouds, the red and yellow
and blue cars standing out in the sodden darkness because of the water.
You could feel the cold, wet drizzle, the soppy tracks, the weariness of
"throwing switches." There was a lone brakeman in the foreground,
"throwing" a red brake signal. He was quite black and evidently wet.

"A symphony in grey," said M. Charles succinctly.

They came swiftly after this, without much comment from either, Eugene
putting one canvas after another before him, leaving it for a few
moments and replacing it with another. His estimate of his own work did
not rise very rapidly, for M. Charles was persistently distant,
but the latter could not help voicing approval of "After The Theatre,"
a pa