Carl smiled without answering, while the others derided his self-immersion. Jenesco knew no other weapon save an emotional club. He was a machinist who had taken up painting two years before this late winter afternoon and he still kept a little shop where he occasionally sold and repaired machines. This combination of rough mechanic and art-desiring man had given its surface lure to Carl’s imagination and he had commenced to spend most of his time at Jenesco’s home. Short, and with the body of a subdued, light-weight prize-fighter, Jenesco was a small hurricane of physical elations. He had the face of a corrupted cherub that had sold its innocence to mental inanities, and his mind was a conceited confusion of naive ideas. He had been attracted to painting because it brought his hands into motion, thus encouraging the habit which they could not forget after their working hours, and because it taught color and flexibility to the hard greys, browns, and blacks of his daily toil. He belonged to that band of men who spend a lifetime in stubbornly walking down a road of artistic effort which does not lead them to any distinct surrender. Their imaginations are not weak enough to kneel before the drab regularities of life and not strong enough to escape from the instinctive push of dead men’s realities. From that afternoon on, Carl began to see more of Jenesco and less of Kone. Kone was not a creator but merely transposed, with a hungry fire, the sentences of other men, and after you solved the snapping tricks with which he did this, his ironies became thin and lamely transparent. Carl preferred the wolfish wit with which Jenesco, an ogling Proletarian, tore silk and satin from the shrinking flesh of obvious hypocrisies in life. It was at least a lurching circus of words--a pulsating buffoonery. He scarcely ever saw Martha now, since their self-immersions tended to create a sterile restraint between them, with words and hands playing the part of irrelevant intruders. Each of them secretly despised life and its people, while giving a pretended attention, but they used different methods. Martha fluttered her emotional veils, with a breathless coercion, while Carl dodged beneath a carnival of grotesquely mated words.