"Whose dirt-dump is this, anyhow?" and he held it up to view. "Might as well try to get sunlight out of powdered brick. Look at that pile of mud," and he pointed to some dry color near the thumb-hole.
"Which palette?" came a voice.
Jack held it up for the inspection of the room.
"Oh, that's Parker Ridgway's," answered Fred.
"He was here the other day and made a half-hour's sketch of a model I had."
The announcement of Ridgway's name was greeted with shouts of laughter. He was a society painter of the day, pupil of Winterhalter and Meyer von Bremen, and had carried off more portraits and at higher prices than all the other men put together.
"Keep on! keep on! Laugh away," grumbled Waller squeezing a tube of Prussian blue on his palette.
"When any one of you fellows can get $4,000 for a season's work you can talk; until you do, you can keep your mouths shut as tight as Long Island clams."
"Who got it?"
"The Honorable Parker Ridgway, R.A., P.Q., and I don't know but X.Y.Z.," roared Waller.
"I'd like to know how?" asked Watson, reaching over Fred's arm for the bottle of turpentine.
"That's what he did," snapped out Waller.
"Did what?"
"Knew how."
"But he doesn't know how," cried Munson from across the table. "I sat alongside of that fellow at the Ecole for two years. He can't draw, and never could.
His flesh was beastly, his modelling worse, and his technique--a botch. You can see what color he uses," and he pointed to the palette Jack was trying to clean.
"Granted, my boy," said Waller. "I didn't say he could PAINT; I said he knew how to earn $4,000 in three months painting portraits."
"He never painted a portrait worth four cents.
Why, I knew--"
"Dry up, Munson!" interrupted Jack. "Go on, Waller, tell us how he did it."
"By using some horse-sense and a little tact; getting in with the procession and bolding his cud up," retorted Waller, in a solemn tone.
"Give him room! Give him room!" cried Oliver, with a laugh, pouring a little dryer into his oil-cup.
He loved to hear Waller talk. "He flings his words about as if they were chunks of coal," he would always say.
The great man wheeled his chair around and faced the room. Oliver's words had sounded like a challenge.
"Keep it up!--pound away," he cried, his face reddening. "I've watched Ridgway ever since he arrived here last spring, and I will give you his recipe for success. He didn't fall overboard into a second-rate club as soon as he got here and rub his brushes on his coat-sleeve to look artistic. Not much!
He had his name put up at the Union; got Croney to cut his clothes, and Leary to make his hats, played croquet with the girls he knew, drove tandem--his brother-in-law's--and dined out every night in the week. Every day or two he would haul out one of his six-foot canvases, and give it a coat of bitumen. Always did this when some club swell was around who would tell about it,"
"Did it with a sponge," muttered Munson. "Old trick of his!"
"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.
