Everyone is astonished at the change in Morniel Mathaway since he was discovered, everyone but me. They remember him as an unbathed and untalented Greenwich Village painter who began almost every second sentence with “I” and ended every third one with “me.” He had all the pushing, half-frightened conceit of the man who secretly suspects himself to be a second-rater or worse, and any half-hour conversation with him made your ears droop with the boastful yells he threw at them.

I understand the change in him, the soft-spoken self-depreciation as well as the sudden overwhelming success. But then, I was there the day he was “discovered”—except that isn’t the right way to put it. To tell you the truth, I don’t know how to put it really, considering the absolute impossibility—yes, I said impossibility, not improbability—of the whole business. All I know for sure is that trying to make sense out of it gives me belly-yammers and the biggest headache this side of calculus.

We were talking about his discovery that day. I was sitting, carefully balanced, on the one wooden chair in his cold little Bleecker Street studio, because I was too sophisticated to sit in the easy chair.

Morniel practically paid the rent on his studio with that easy chair. It was a broken-down tangle of filthy upholstery that was high in the front of the seat and very low in the back. When you sat in it, things began sliding out of your pockets—loose change, keys, wallets, anything—and into the jungle of rusty springs and rotting wood-work below.

Whenever newcomers came to the place, Morniel would make a big fuss about showing them to “the comfortable chair.” And as they twisted about painfully trying to find a spot between the springs, his eyes would gleam and he’d get all lit up with good cheer. Because the more they moved about, the more would fall out of their pockets.