He stretched out his legs and began to look about him. Syd’s place was a “pad,” all right.

As far as he could make out in the restricted lighting provided by two naked and dirty bulbs, he was in the front of a dilapidated cottage whose rooms had been knocked together. The end where he found himself was occupied by a bench bearing a conglomeration of painter’s materials. Canvases were ranged along the walls, including a work which seemed to have been inspired by Miss Harkness herself or at least by her breeches, which were represented with unexpected realism.

The rest of the room was occupied by the divan bed, chairs, a filthy sink, a color television, and the stereo components. A certain creeping smell as of defective drainage was overlaid by the familiar pungency of turpentine, oil, and lead.

Ricky began to ask himself a series of unanswerable questions. Why had Miss Harkness decided against L’Espérance? Was Mr. Jones the father of her child? How did Mr. Jones contrive to support an existence combining extremes of squalor with color television and highly sophisticated stereo equipment? How good or how bad was Mr. Jones’s painting?

As if in answer to this last conundrum, Mr. Jones got up and began to put a succession of canvases on the easel, presumably for Ricky to look at.

This was a familiar procedure for Ricky. For as long as he could remember, young painters, fortified by an introduction or propelled by their own hardihood, would bring their works to his mother and prop them up for her astringent consideration. Ricky hoped he had learned to look at pictures in the right way but he had never learned to talk easily about them, and in his experience the painters themselves, good or bad, were as a rule extremely inarticulate. Perhaps, in this respect, Mr. Jones’s formidable silences were merely occupational characteristics.

But what would Troy, Ricky’s mother, have said about the paintings? Mr. Jones had skipped through a tidy sequence of styles. As representation retired before abstraction and abstraction yielded to collage and collage to surrealism, Ricky fancied he could hear her crisp dismissal: “Not much cop, I’m afraid, poor chap.”