You had to like it—so long as you had eyes—whether or not your appreciation had been limited to representational painting until now; even if, in fact, you’d never particularly cared about painting of any school.

I don’t want to sound maudlin, but I actually felt tears in my eyes. Anyone who was at all sensitive to beauty would have reacted the same way.

Not Morniel, though. “Oh, that kind of stuff,” he said as if a great light had broken on him. “Why didn’t you tell me you wanted that kind of stuff?”

Mr. Glescu clutched at Morniel’s dirty tee-shirt. “Do you mean you have paintings like this, too?”

“Not paintings-painting. Just one. I did it last week as a sort of experiment, but I wasn’t satisfied with the way it turned out, so I gave it to the girl downstairs. Care to take a look at it?”

“Oh, yes! Very, very much!”

Morniel reached for the book and tossed it casually on the bed. “Okay,” he said. “Come on. It won’t take more than a minute or two.”

As we trooped downstairs, I found myself boiling with perplexity. One thing I was sure of—as sure as of the fact that Geoffrey Chaucer had lived before Algernon Swinburne—nothing that Morniel had ever done or had the capacity of ever doing could come within a million esthetic miles of the reproduction in that book. And for all of his boasting, for all of his seemingly inexhaustible conceit, I was certain that he also knew it.

He stopped before a door two floors below and rapped on it. There was no answer. He waited a few seconds and knocked again. Still no answer.

“Damn,” he said. “She isn’t home. And I did want you to see that one.”

“I want to see it,” Mr. Glescu told him earnestly. “I want to see anything that looks like your mature work. But time is growing so short—”