“Who is Peter Tedd? Never heard of him.”

“Then this must he before he was discovered. But please remember, I am an art scholar, not a literary one. It is entirely possible,” he went on soothingly, “that were you to mention your name to a specialist in the field of minor twentieth-century versifiers, he could place you with a minimum of difficulty. Entirely possible.”

I glanced at Morniel, and he was grinning at me from the bed. He had entirely recovered by now and was beginning to soak the situation in through his pores. The whole situation. His standing. Mine.

I decided I hated every single one of his guts.

Why did it have to be someone like Morniel Mathaway that got that kind of nod from fate? There were so many painters who were decent human beings, and yet this bragging slug …

And all the time, a big part of my mind was wandering around in circles. It just proved, I kept saying to myself, that you need the perspective of history to properly evaluate anything in art. You think of all the men who were big guns in their time and today are forgotten, that contemporary of Beethoven’s, for example, who, while he was alive, was considered much the greater man, and whose name is known today only to musicologists. But still—

Mr. Glescu glanced at the forefinger of his right hand where a little black dot constantly expanded and contracted. “My time is getting short,” he said. “And while it is an ineffable, overwhelming delight for me to be standing in your studio, Mr. Mathaway, and looking at you at last in the flesh, I wonder if you would mind obliging me with a small favor?”

“Sure,” Morniel nodded, getting up. “You name it. Nothing’s too good for you. What do you want?”

Mr. Glescu swallowed as if he were about to bring himself to knock on the gates of Paradise. “I wonder—I’m sure you don’t mind—could you possibly let me look at the painting you’re working on at the moment? The idea of seeing a Mathaway in an unfinished state, with the paint still wet upon it—” He shut his eyes, as if he couldn’t believe that all this was really happening to him.