Querida laughed:  “What has Neville done to you, my friend?”

“To me?” repeated Allaire with a shrug.  “Oh, nothing.  It isn’t that....  All the same when I had my exhibition at the Monson Galleries I went to him and said, ’See here, Neville, I’ve got some Shoe-trust and Button-trust women to pour tea for me.  Now you know a lot of fashionable people and I want my tea-pourers to see them, and I want the papers to say that they’ve been to a private view of my exhibition.’

“He gave me one of those absent-treatment stares and said he’d tell all the really interesting people he knew; and the damnedest lot of scrubby, dowdy, down-at-the-heels tatterdemalions presented his card at my private view that you ever saw outside an artist’s rathskeller, a lower Fifth Avenue reception, or a varnishing day!  By God, I can go to the bread-line and get that sort of lookers myself—­and I don’t care whether his bunch came from Tenth Street Colonial stock or the Washington Square nobility or the landed gentry of Chelsea or from the purlieus of the Bronx, which is where they apparently belong!  I can get that kind myself.  I wanted automobiles and broughams and clothes, and I got one sea-going taxi, and the dirty end of the stick!  And to cap the climax he strolled in himself with a girl whose face is familiar to everybody who looks at bath tubs in the back of the magazines—­Valerie West!  And I want to tell you I couldn’t look my Shoe-trust tea-pourers in the face; and they’re so mad that I haven’t got an order out of them since.”

Querida laughed till the tears stood in his big, velvety, almond-shaped eyes.

“Why didn’t you come to me?” he said.

“Tell you the truth, Querida, I would have if I’d known then that you were painting portraits of half of upper Fifth Avenue.  Besides,” he added, naively, “that was before I began to see you in the grand tier at the opera every week.”

“It was before I sat anywhere except in the gallery,” said Querida with a humorous shrug.  “Until this winter I knew nobody, either.  And very often I washed my own handkerchiefs and dried them on the window pane.  I had only fame for my laundress and notoriety for my butcher.”

“Hey?” said Allaire, a trifle out of countenance.

“It is very true.  It cost me so much to paint and frame my pictures that the prices they brought scarcely paid for models and materials.”  He added, pleasantly:  “I have dined more often on a box of crackers and a jar of olives than at a table set with silver and spread with linen.”  He laughed without affectation or bitterness: 

“It has been a long road, Allaire—­from a stable-loft studio to—­” he shrugged—­“the ‘Van Rypens’ grand tier box, for example.”

“How in God’s name did you do it?” inquired Allaire, awed to the momentary obliteration of envy.

“I—­painted,” said Querida, smiling.

“Sure.  I know that.  I suppose it was the hellish row made over your canvases last winter that did the trick.”