Whitaker ignored his brazen air of a.s.surance. It was like Kenny, he reflected, to find an unexpected loophole and emerge from it with the air of a conqueror.

"People with an over-plus of temperament," he said, "wreck the lives of others. Brian has just stepped out in the nick of time."

"You mean," flashed Kenny with anger in his eyes, "you mean I've tried to wreck the life of my own son? By the powers of war, John, that's too much!"

"I didn't say you had tried. I mean merely that you were accidentally succeeding. The sunsets--"

"d.a.m.n the sunsets!" roared Kenny, losing his head.

"It was time for that," agreed Whitaker.

"Time for what?"

"You usually d.a.m.n the irrefutable thing. Why you wanted Brian to paint pictures," went on Whitaker, ignoring Kenny's outraged sputter, "when he couldn't, is and always has been a matter of considerable worry and mystery to me--"

"It needn't have been. That, I fancy, John, you can see for yourself.

I worry very little about how your paper is run."

"But I think I've solved it. It's your vanity."

"My G.o.d!" said Kenny with a gasp.

"You wanted to have a hand in what he did. Then you could afford to be gracious. There are some, Kenny, who must always direct in order to enjoy."

There was a modic.u.m of enjoyment with Whitaker around, hinted Kenny sullenly.

Whitaker found his irrelevant trick of umbrage trying in the extreme.

He lost his temper and said that which he had meant to leave to inference.

"Kenny, Brian's success, in which you, curiously enough, seem to have had a visionary faith, would have linked him to you in a sort of artistic dependence in which you shone with inferential genius and generosity."

It hurt.

"So!" said Kenny, his color high.

"It may be," said Whitaker, feeling sorry for him, "that I've put that rather strongly but I think I've dug into the underlying something which, linked with your warm-hearted generosity and a real love for Brian, made you stubborn and unreasonable about his work. Of the big gap in temperament and the host of petty things that maddened Brian to the point of distraction, it's unnecessary for me to speak. You must know that your happy-go-lucky self-indulgence more often than not has spelled discomfort of a definite sort for Brian. You're generous, I'll admit. Generous to a fault. But your generosity is always congenial.

It's never the sort that hurts. The only kind of generosity that will help in this crisis is the kind that hurts. It's up to you, Kenny, to do some mental house-cleaning, admit the cobwebs and brush them away, instead of using them fantastically for drapery."

Whitaker thanked his lucky stars he'd gotten on so well. Kenny, affronted, was usually more capricious and elusive.

"Whitaker," said Kenny, his eyes imploring, "you don't--you can't mean that Brian isn't coming back?"

Whitaker sighed. After all, Kenny never heard all of anything, just as he never read all of a letter unless it was asterisked and under-lined and riveted to his attention by a mult.i.tude of pen devices.

"Kenny, have you been listening?"

"No!" lied Kenny.

"Brian," flung out Whitaker wrathfully, "isn't coming back. I thank G.o.d for his sake."

His loss of temper brought a hornet's nest about his ears. Kenny swung to his feet in smoldering fury. He expressed his opinion of Whitaker, editors, Brian and sons. The sum of them merged into an unchristian melee of officiousness and black ingrat.i.tude. He recounted the events of the night before with stinging sarcasm in proof of Brian's regularity. He ended magnificently by blaming Brian for the disorder of the studio. There were handles everywhere. And Brian in an exuberance of amiability had broken a statuette. Likely Whitaker would see even in that some form of paternal oppression.

"Whitaker," flung out Kenny indignantly, "Brian plays but one instrument in this studio and we have a dozen. Wasn't it precisely like him to pick out that d.a.m.ned psaltery there with the crooked stick?

I mean--wasn't it like him to pick out something with a fiendish appendage that could be lost, and keep the studio in an uproar when he wanted to play it?"

Whitaker laughed in spite of himself. The psaltery stick was famous.

Moreover, Brian--Brian, mind you, who talked of truth with hair-splitting piety--Brian had that very day at noon forced his father to the telling of a lie.

"But he wasn't here," said Whitaker, mystified. "He lunched with me."

"The fact remains," insisted Kenny with dignity. "I myself told Garry Rittenhouse he'd gone up to Reynolds to collect some money. And Garry, thinking he had come back, believed it."

"Kenny," said Whitaker, his patience quite gone, "are you mad? How on earth did Brian force you into that lie?"

"By not coming home," said Kenny sulkily. "If he'd come home as a lad should, I needn't have told it. You can see that for yourself."

Whitaker dazedly threw up his hands.

Having successfully baffled his opponent with the brilliancy of his unreason, Kenny enlarged upon the humiliation he must experience when Garry learned the truth. At a familiar climax of self-glorification, in which Kenny claimed he had saved Brian from no end of club-gossip by his timely evasion of the truth, Whitaker lost his temper and went home.

He left his host in a dangerous mood of quiet.

It was a quiet unlike Kenny, who hated to think, and presently he flung his pipe across the studio, fuming at what seemed to him unprecedented disorder. It was getting on his nerves. No man could work in such a hodge-podge. Even inspiration was likely to be chaotic and futuristic.

Small blame to Brian if he resented it all. To-morrow, if Reynolds deigned to appear with his check, he would summon Mrs. Haggerty, and the studio should have a cleaning that the mercenary old beldame would remember. Kenny vaguely coupled Mrs. Haggerty with the present disorder and resented both, his defiant eyes lingering with new interest upon a jumble of musical instruments in a corner.

With a m.u.f.fled objurgation he fell upon the jumble and began to overhaul it. The object sought defied his fevered efforts to unearth it and with teeth set, he ransacked the studio, resentfully flinging a melee of hindrances right and left.

The telephone rang.

"Kenny," said Garry's patient voice, "what in Heaven's name are you doing? What hit the wall?"

"I'm hunting the stick to that d.a.m.ned psaltery," snapped Kenny and banged the receiver into the hook, one hand as usual clenched frenziedly in his hair.

Later, with the studio a record of earthquake, he found it under a model stand and wiping his forehead anch.o.r.ed it to the psaltery for good and all with a shoestring.

Horribly depressed he thumped on the wall for Garry, who came at once, wondering wryly if Brian had come in and the need again was mediation.

"You might as well know," began Kenny at once, "that Brian didn't go up to Reynolds for me this noon--"

Garry stared.

"It was a lie," flung out Kenny with a jerk, "a d.a.m.nable, deliberate, indecent lie. Whitaker says he's gone for good." His look was wistful and indignant. "Garry, what's wrong?" he demanded. "What on earth _is_ it? Why couldn't things have gone on as they were, without G.o.d knows how many people picking _me_ for a target? As far as I can see I'm merely maintaining my usual average of imperfection and all the rest of the world has gone mad."

"I suppose, Kenny," began Garry lamely, "you must be starting a new cycle. Jan could tell you. He talks a lot about the cycle of dates and the philosophy of vibrations--"

"I know that I regard the truth as something sacred, to be handled with delicacy and discretion," began Kenny with bitter fluency. "I'm an unsuccessful parent with an over-supply of hair and teeth, afflicted with hairbrained, unquenchable youth. I'd be a perennial in the Land of the Young and could hobn.o.b indefinitely with his Flighty Highness, the King of Youth. I'm forty-four years young and highly temperamentalized. I've made a mess of parenting Brian and I'm an abject failure."