Jeremiah scratched his chin slowly, and worked the tip of a square-toed boot against his waste-paper basket. "I dunno. It's a good deal of an undertaking," he declared. "Surely," assented Roscoe Orlando. "Do we want it to be anything less? Don't we want to do something--a big thing, too--that will be a credit to ourselves and a real adornment to our city?" Jeremiah puckered up his mouth and slowly blinked his little red eyes. "I've had one or two of those young painter fellows after me lately," he said in ruminative tone, as he picked at the green baize of his desk-top. He spoke with a slight querulousness, as if these wily and hardy adventurers had wilfully hit upon him as the weak spot in the defences, as the vulnerable point of the Grindstone. In particular he saw a pair of burning black eyes, a pair of eager, sinewy hands strewing drawings over the pink and gold brocades of his front parlour suite, and a shock of dark hair that swished about over a high square forehead as the work of hurried exposition raged along against a pitiless ticking of the marble-and-gilt clock and Preciosa's hasty adjustment of the green velvet toque. "Haven't I had them after _me_!" cried Roscoe Orlando, jealous of his standing as an enlightened and sympathetic amateur. "But we ought to deal--really, we ought to--with painters of standing and responsibility, and no others. We must keep in mind such things as position, reputation, clientele. My partner, for example, once contracted--or tried to--for a large landscape of his stock-farm out beyond Glenwood Park; and the artist, sir----Well, you wouldn't believe the trouble we had before we got through. Our lawyer himself said that never in the whole course of his professional career had he----" Jeremiah blinked and puckered a little more, and sighed as he abstractedly prodded among his pigeonholes. That slippery floor typified it all,--that dim room full of dusky corners! Ah, if he could only get that slim young man with the long coat and the pointed beard out on the black-and-white chequered pavement of the Grindstone, fair and square in the honest light of day! In such a situation a downright, straightforward old contractor could do himself something like justice. It would be playing a return match on his own ground. "I dunno," said Jeremiah. "I'd 'most as soon not have anything to do with such matters and with that sort of people----" He saw Dill as a dog might view a lizard, or a goat a swan; after all, there was no common ground for them--no way of coming together. "But if it's got to be done," he concluded, "perhaps he would do as well to start with as anybody else." "I think so," said Roscoe Orlando. "I'll speak about it in a day or so to Hill." VII