“You see,” he explained to the bewildered Maurice, “I want the tone of this dive to be at once romantic, realistic, humorous, and ironic. I guess I’ve captured it all, now.” Maurice sighed as he helped his cousin to hang a pair of fine tapestries, begged from Hal’s trusting mother. “To draw the dowagers,” Hal said. Odd as it seemed to the elder man, the dowagers were really drawn. After all, you never can tell; dowagers are not exempt. Through a judicious one-by-one exposition (a Japanese idea, borrowed by Hal from The Book of Tea), many valuable objects salvaged from the wreck of the Wrayne fortunes were disposed of at excellent prices; and before the year was out, the boy had succeeded in selling to his college friends, and their friends, a goodly number of little pictures, studies and sketches, mostly in the new manner, whatever that happened to be. His “quartette of skirts,” far from being an encumbrance, were, so he stoutly declared, “a high-class asset.” His sister Dodo was a wonder in throwing a bit of bargain-counter drapery over a mission stool, so as to make you think of a Doge’s palace. She and his wife organized those charming teas, which, when presided over by his lady-mother, with her authentic air of _belle Marquise_, made everything look thoroughly salable and artistic, from those queer Lithuanian sketches to Hal’s own models for stage sets. Prosperity was just around the corner; and the only singular circumstance was, Hal began to have ideals. “No junk, girlie,” he would warn the enterprising Dodo. “No Greenwich Village in mine! I mean to run a gallery fit for a refined limousine trade, and I don’t want my clients to think they’re slumming, just because I keep ’em in touch with the grand new movements in art.” Maurice Price looked on, fascinated by the spectacle of his young relative’s start in a career that was neither law nor art, yet had been suggested to Hal by his slender knowledge of both. “Why don’t you send me up some of _your_ things?” the boy boldly asked Maurice. “They would sell like hot cakes, mixed in with my regular stuff.” And Maurice, full of good-will, had replied, “Perhaps I may, if I can look up some inexpensive little bits your customers might like.” “Not on your tintype!” retorted Hal. “Can’t you see, old Price-of-Great-Pearls, my quartette and I have to _live_ on my thirty per cent? _I_ don’t want your inexpensive little bits! I want your masterpieces, the costlier the better. Bet I can sell ’em for you, too, as easy as Farintosh, or MacDuff. Your being an Academician doesn’t stand in _my_ way!” Maurice flushed, not so much on account of being an Academician, as because he suddenly saw himself self-convicted of a lack of imagination in regard to his cousin.