Wilfred could scarcely credit his own situation. There he lay, he the solitary one, inside man of four lads stretched out on two cots placed against the wall of Stanny’s studio in the assumption that they would afford more room when they were shoved together. The other three were asleep. Sleep was far from Wilfred’s eyes. His head hummed with wine. He lay on his back, very still in his strait place for fear of disturbing Stanny, who was alongside him. Jasper was on the other side of Stanny; and Jasper’s young brother Fred had the perilous outside place. It had started to rain fitfully on the tin roof overhead. Wilfred remembered how the low-hanging clouds had rosily given back the glow of the street lights. That delicate glow was coming through the skylight now, pervading the room with a ghostly radiance. The front of the room came down like a low forehead to two windows, set in only a foot above the floor. You had to go down on your knees to look out. Below, all day, was spread the panorama of the shoppers on the busy side of Fourteenth street opposite, and the sidewalk vendors with their baskets. The skylight was in the high part of the room at the back. That room was dear to Wilfred beyond measure. Not for its beauty, because it contrived at the same time to be both bare and littered—it was a chaos now, after parties on two succeeding nights. It was the first room where he had been free; a man’s room, smelling of tobacco, where you could spread yourself. It didn’t have to be tidied up until you felt like it; dirty clothes could be kicked into the corners. The paraphernalia of Stanny’s trade lay about—Stanny, his friend, whose thick shoulder lay warmly against Wilfred’s thin one now; drawing-boards; sheets of bristol board; drawings stood up with their faces turned to the wall; and everywhere, thumb-tacks and Higgins ink bottles with their tops like black nipples. To the walls were pinned several of Stanny’s best drawings; distant prospects of landscape that stung Wilfred with their beauty. It was marvellous to him that such effects could be created with a scratching pen. When Stanny drew people, their faces all had a slightly tormented look. Funny! It had been a lively thirty hours in the lives of the friends. Wilfred went over it in his mind, smiling into the darkness. Jasper’s young brother Fred had come down from Lockport to see the town; and they had had a supper of canned lobster and Nebiola in his honor. That started it. To their provender had been added a fruit cake, brought from home by the guest—such a fruit cake as Wilfred had never tasted. Canned lobster and fruit cake! Nobody had been sick but the guest.