Between Ewing and Teevan there was even a new bond. Ewing discovered that money inevitably left one's pocket in New York, even if it vanished under auspices less violent and less obscure than Ben had so gloomily feared. The steady dribble was quite as effective. When he awoke to this great fiscal truth he saw that some condescension of effort would be required. He must sell enough drawings to sustain him modestly. He broached this regrettable necessity to Teevan, wishing the little man to understand that, in making a few things for money, he was guilty of no treachery to the Teevan ideal. But Teevan, much to his embarrassment, had extended the full hand of bestowal. He was hurt when Ewing demurred; then annoyed that so petty an obstacle should retard a progress so splendid. He never dared to suspect a decadence in the resolution of his young friend. Ewing was cut by his distress, stung by his doubt, and persuaded by his logic. He accepted Teevan's money, though not without instinctive misgiving. There were moments when he traitorously wondered if it might not be better for him to lack a friend with ideals so rigid. And more than once he suffered the disquieting suspicion of some unreality in and through it all--his intimacy with Teevan, and his desertion of a trail whose beginnings, at least, he knew. There was sometimes a faint ring of artificiality in the whole situation. Yet Teevan's heartiness and his certainty--the felicitous certainty of a star in its course--always dispelled this vague unquiet, and at last it brought Ewing a new pleasure to remember that an actual, material obligation--one increasing at measured intervals--now existed between them. He had never spoken openly to Mrs. Laithe of his intimacy with Teevan. The little man had conveyed his wish of this by indirect speech. He would have liked to tell her of the solace and substantial benefits of their comradeship, to dwell upon the shining merits of this whole-souled but modest benefactor--for Teevan caused his charge to infer that a shame of doing good openly inspired his hints--but he had, perforce, to let the praise die unspoken. Nor did he speak often of Mrs. Laithe to Teevan, for the little man was not only bitter as to woman's influence on the life artistic, but inclined to hold the sex lightly, it seemed, in a much wider aspect. And he spoke, Ewing was sure, out of a ripe experience. He had no difficulty in detecting, under the little man's self-depreciating talk, that Teevan had ever been a power among women, and was not even yet invincibly averse to gallant adventure; not yet a man to be resisted. He was far from bluntly confessing this, but sometimes, when the brandy was low in the decanter, he would tacitly admit a romantic past; romantic, perhaps, to the point of turbulence. And once, when there was no brandy left, he spoke of specific affairs, particularly of one the breaking off of which was giving him the devil's own worry.