Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/120

 casting a shadow on a God-made river, perfectly simple and quite paintable. Just enough irony to give the picture the suggestion of caricature that every good picture should have. Any fool, thought Grover, can paint what's materially there. It takes some one with a philosophy, or at any rate an attitude, to convey the little tilt that makes all the difference, to point the moral and adorn the tale without actually doing so. All I need to do now is to do it. And am I going to? Apparently not. I'm going back to a stuffy flat with seven useless sketches of a useless cat. Rhyme and all. No moral or anything Is it always going to be like this with me—sort of all dressed up and no place to go?

Worst of all, he reflected, as he packed his materials neatly into the portfolio, he had actually postponed his departure for the sake of looking like an inspired painter in the eyes of the benighted bourgeois who had strolled in with their families for a Sunday afternoon apéritif, all dust and alpaca,—and I hope I'll remember this to my dying day, and never accuse anybody else again of being a poseur, ever. I might just as well have been sitting at the Dome all afternoon.

"All I need," he wailed that night, in a letter to Geoffrey Saint, "is a reason for being."

The first item on the schedule was the following note: Look up Monsieur Ripert.