"Next thing he did," continued Waller, ignoring Munson's aside, "was to refuse a thousand-dollar commission offered by a vulgar real-estate man to paint a two-hundred-pound pink-silk sofa-cushion of a wife in a tight-fitting waist. This spread like the measles. It was the talk of the club, of dinner-tables and piazzas, and before sundown Ridgway's exclusiveness in taste and artistic instincts were established. Then he hunted up a pretty young married woman occupying the dead-centre of the sanctified social circle, went into spasms over her beauty--so classic, such an exquisite outline; grew confidential with the husband at the club, and begged permission to make just a sketch only the size of his hand--wanted it for his head of Sappho, Berlin Exhibition. Next he rented a suite of rooms, crowded in a lot of borrowed tapestries, brass, Venetian chests, lamps and hangings; gave a tea--servants this time in livery--exhibited his Sappho; refused a big price for it from the husband; got orders instead for two half-lengths, $1,500 each, finished them in two weeks, declined more commissions on account of extreme fatigue; disappeared with the first frost and the best cottage people; booked three more full-lengths in New York--two to be painted in Paris and the other on his return in the spring; was followed to the steamer by a bevy of beauties, half-smothered in flowers, and disappeared in a halo of artistic glory just $4,000 in." Fred broke out into a roar, in which the whole room joined. "And you call that art, do you?" cried Munson, laying down his palette. His face was flushed, his eyes snapping with indignation. "I do, my babbling infant," retorted Waller. "I call it the art of making the most of your opportunities and putting your best foot foremost. That's a thing you fellows never seem to understand. You want to shuffle around in carpet-slippers, live in a garret, and wait until some money-bags climbs up your crazy staircases to discover you. Ridgway puts his foot in a patent-leather pump and silk stocking, and never steps on a carpet that isn't two inches thick. Merchants, engineers, manufacturers, and even scientists, when they have anything to sell, go where there is somebody to buy; why shouldn't an artist?" "Just like a fakir peddling cheap jewelry," said Stedman, in a low voice, sending a cloud of smoke to the ceiling. "Or a bunco-man trading watches with a farmer," remarked Jack Bedford. "What do you say, My Lord Tom-Noddy"--and he slapped Oliver on the back. The sobriquet was one of Jack's pet names for Oliver--all the Kennedy Square people were more or less aristocrats to Jack Bedford, the sign-painter--all except Oliver.