No More Learning

"Just imagine," Dick continued, "if we could publish a few of these dear
little things every time the Nilghai subsidises a man who can write, to
give the public an honest opinion of my pictures. "

"Well, you'll admit I always tell you when I have done anything of that
kind. I know I can't hammer you as you ought to be hammered, so I give
the job to another. Young Maclagan, for instance----"

"No-o--one half-minute, old man; stick your hand out against the dark of
the wall-paper--you only burble and call me names. That left shoulder's
out of drawing. I must literally throw a veil over that. Where's my
pen-knife? Well, what about Maclagan? "

"I only gave him his riding-orders to--to lambast you on general
principles for not producing work that will last. "

"Whereupon that young fool,"--Dick threw back his head and shut one
eye as he shifted the page under his hand,--"being left alone with an
ink-pot and what he conceived were his own notions, went and spilt them
both over me in the papers. You might have engaged a grown man for the
business, Nilghai. How do you think the bridal veil looks now, Torp? "

"How the deuce do three dabs and two scratches make the stuff stand away
from the body as it does? " said Torpenhow, to whom Dick's methods were
always new.

"It just depends on where you put 'em.
If Maclagan had know that much
about his business he might have done better. "

"Why don't you put the damned dabs into something that will stay, then? "
insisted the Nilghai, who had really taken considerable trouble in
hiring for Dick's benefit the pen of a young gentleman who devoted most
of his waking hours to an anxious consideration of the aims and ends of
Art, which, he wrote, was one and indivisible.

"Wait a minute till I see how I am going to manage my procession of
wives. You seem to have married extensively, and I must rough 'em in
with the pencil--Medes, Parthians, Edomites. . . . Now, setting
aside the weakness and the wickedness and--and the fat-headedness of
deliberately trying to do work that will live, as they call it, I'm
content with the knowledge that I've done my best up to date, and I
shan't do anything like it again for some hours at least--probably
years. Most probably never. "

"What! any stuff you have in stock your best work? " said Torpenhow.

"Anything you've sold? " said the Nilghai.

"Oh no.