ss boys, where book-learning was a
negligible part of the curriculum. When he was sixteen, a Catholic priest
took him to Greensburg, Pennsylvania, to keep house for him. The priest
did something to fill in the large gaps in the boy's education,--taught
him to like "Don Quixote" and "The Golden Legend," and encouraged him to
mess with paints and crayons in his room up under the slope of the
mansard. When Don wanted to go to New York to study at the Art League,
the priest got him a night job as packer in one of the big department
stores. Since then, Hedger had taken care of himself; that was his only
responsibility. He was singularly unencumbered; had no family duties, no
social ties, no obligations toward any one but his landlord. Since he
travelled light, he had travelled rather far. He had got over a good deal
of the earth's surface, in spite of the fact that he never in his life
had more than three hundred dollars ahead at any one time, and he had
already outlived a succession of convictions and revelations about his
art.

Though he was now but twenty-six years old, he had twice been on the
verge of becoming a marketable product; once through some studies of New
York streets he did for a magazine, and once through a collection of
pastels he brought home from New Mexico, which Remington, then at the
height of his popularity, happened to see, and generously tried to push.
But on both occasions Hedger decided that this was something he didn't
wish to carry further,--simply the old thing over again and got
nowhere,--so he took enquiring dealers experiments in a "later manner,"
that made them put him out of the shop. When he ran short of money, he
could always get any amount of commercial work; he was an expert
draughtsman and worked with lightning speed. The rest of his time he
spent in groping his way from one kind of painting into another, or
travelling about without luggage, like a tramp, and he was chiefly
occupied with getting rid of ideas he had once thought very fine.

Hedger's circumstances, since he had moved to Washington Square, were
affluent compared to anything he had ever known before. He was now able
to pay advance rent and turn the key on his studio when he went away for
four months at a stretch. It didn't occur to him to wish to be richer
than this. To be sure, he did without a great many things other people
think necessary, but he didn't miss them, because he had never had them.
He belonged to no clubs,