Carl and Alfred Kone went to the latter’s room in a dormitory at the university and sat until an early hour of the morning, arguing with an intensity that made their tobacco smoke seem a cloud of gunpowder. Kone was that tense incongruity--an ironical sentimentalist. Within him, emotion cajoled thought to a softer brutality and thought intruded its staccato, exploring note upon the limpid abandon of emotion. A deliberate friendship rose between these men, like a translucent wall through which men can see each other without touching, for each one knew that the other held a baffling insincerity of imagination and was afraid that he might be deftly ridiculed if he failed to measure his words. Kone admired the nimble restlessness of Carl, a quality which he was compelled mechanically to imitate, while Carl liked the explosive way in which Kone evaded himself. Kone was now almost thirty years old but his machine-like capering made him seem much younger and he bounded through life like a sophisticated street-urchin, swindling himself with fiercely endurable makeshifts in place of dead dreams. His tragedy rested in the fact that he was not a creator and the knowledge of this was to him a secret poison from which he had to escape with many a gale of make-believe laughter. CHAPTER XIV. One afternoon, four months after the Apperson party, Carl, Kone, and Jenesco, a Roumanian painter, sat in the latter’s little blending of studio and bedroom and looked at a landscape which he had just finished. Jenesco’s eyes lazily flirted with triumph and his small, ruddy face displayed the expression of a child throwing a few last, unnecessary grains upon a sand-hill. “Boys, what do you think of it?” he asked in a tone of confident fatherhood. Kone and Carl scanned the painting. It was a mother-goose transfiguration, too quick in its acceptance of violent colors and bearing a blandly forced simplicity. Red, indigo, and orange trees were lining both sides of a road, and the trees were painted in such a manner that they seemed to be kneeling at the roadside. In the distance white mountains, resembling the suggestion of upturned cups, refused the blue wine of sky, and in front of them were fields that looked like wrinkled, green tablecloths spread out to dry. In the sky one large pink cloud forlornly squandered its innocence. “Pleasant--pleasant,” said Kone. “Not realistic, and not fantastic. It deceives both of its mistresses.” “You don’t see what I’m trying to get at,” answered Jenesco. “I’m trying to make reality turn an amiable somersault, as Carl would say. I want to avoid the two extremes of painting the usual photograph on the one hand and making something that no one can understand on the other.”