But Hal did not wholly forswear the Comic Spirit even when he surveyed the clouds on his horizon. The War had cut short his last year at law school, but he knew enough to know that in his young hands the law would be but a sorry staff of life for five persons, four of them in petticoats. He had studied art, too, having been very fond of Cousin Maurice, who had let him play about in the studio, one summer; indeed, being clever and versatile, Hal had painted, under Maurice’s criticism, a series of gay-garlanded borders to temper the austerity of certain court-house decorations, and so had once really earned money as a painter’s assistant. But a month among murals does not constitute a career, Hal Wrayne saw. Art was even less likely than law to provide, all at once, for his “little quartette of skirts,” as he cheerily called his dependents, who varied in age from five months to fifty-five years. What to do? It suddenly occurred to Hal that he might strike a happy medium by running an art gallery. “Art galleries nowadays,” said young Hal, “have got to have a punch to ’em. At least, the new ones have. You know—element of surprise, variety the spice of life, the _dernier cri_ sort of thing. What little I know about law will show me how far I can go, without being arrested for speeding; and what little I know about art, if I spread it out thin enough, ought to carry me along quite a ways.” Maurice Price shook his head. Frankly, he saw nothing in it at all, for Hal and his quartette. Nevertheless, Hal looked about manfully, head up, early and late. He found an old stable with a loft, in the East Fifties, and vigorously remodelled the building into a court with tiny upstairs galleries, decorating court, staircase, and rooms in a somewhat slapdash style, with results that were reminiscent both of his own room at college and his cousin’s studio. As a nucleus for his first show, he had several enigmatic Lithuanian sketches, painted with that fierce peasant coloring which attracts jaded civilizations. There were also some rather unusual unpublished posters by a needy French friend of Hal’s; and by great good luck, he had obtained a whole sequence of Harriet Higsbee’s famous landscape compositions in cut-up linoleum. (You remember Harriet in Paris? How she never washed a paint-brush, or anything?) Between the posters, the Lithuanian things and the linoleum, the Court of New Departures was modestly beginning to keep its promises, even before Hal, in a burst of inspiration, had arranged upon the staircase his own private collection of humorous sculptures in the baser metals, among them a certain ironic green elephant warranted to make the saddest mortal smile again.