liquor. One smothered the occasional fever of hopeless malice. They couldn’t help being lazy and easily pleased and careless. If only they wouldn’t try to be critical about painting. There must be things they couldn’t have; there must be.

“When I am rich,” he thought, and then, “but if I never am?”

He paused with a clean towel in his hand, and looked around. The room was still the same, small and bare and cluttered and dirty. Outside the window was a blue mountain-peak beyond a broad dwindling stretch of juniper-dotted sand, but around his house there were other little low houses, mud houses sinking in the mud of the road. He turned slowly around, looking hopelessly at the yellow walls and at the tiny fire-place spilling pine ash out on the floor. The picture was shining wetly and tiny knobs of paint on the canvas shed tiny shadows. He frowned at it, stepped suddenly closer and examined it carefully.

The letter-box outside clanged in closing, and he heard the postman going away. More bills? Perhaps there would be something else: he decided to see. There was a letter from home, from Minnesota.

The very sight of the postmark sent a heavy lump to his chest. If he didn’t open it? If he dropped it into the gray ashes by accident, and waited until Harvey had burned it in the evening? Busy with the thought, he moved his hand up and down balancing it, weighing it. To open it would mean the day lost, with all his work ruined. He would read it and then flee from the close little room, searching madly all over town for someone—anyone—who knew nothing about Minnesota or families: someone rich and lazy and lucky and dumb; some stranger. Burn it; burn the next one and the next and the next. Burn it.

With a despairing glance at his mountain, a farewell glance, he tore it open and found a check for ten dollars, blotted a little and somehow nibbled at the edges. The letter was on blue-lined paper. From the little square sheets rose an almost visible feeling, like smoke; the room was steeped in Teddy’s guilt. And yet it was a nice letter.