The Pot-Boiler

I

The studio faced north, looking out over a dismal reach of roofs and
chimneys, and rusty fire-escapes hung with heterogeneous garments. A
crust of dirty snow covered the level surfaces, and a December sky
with more snow in it lowered over them.

The room was bare and gaunt, with blotched walls and a stained
uneven floor. On a divan lay a pile of "properties"--limp draperies,
an Algerian scarf, a moth-eaten fan of peacock feathers. The janitor
had forgotten to fill the coal-scuttle over-night, and the cast-iron
stove projected its cold flanks into the room like a black iceberg.
Ned Stanwell, who had just added his hat and great-coat to the
miscellaneous heap on the divan, turned from the empty stove with a
shiver.

"By Jove, this is a little too much like the last act of _Boheme_,"
he said, slipping into his coat again after a vain glance at the
coal-scuttle. Much solitude, and a lively habit of mind, had bred in
him the habit of audible soliloquy, and having flung a shout for the
janitor down the seven flights dividing the studio from the
basement, he turned back, picking up the thread of his monologue.
"Exactly like _Boheme_, really--that crack in the wall is much more
like a stage-crack than a real one--just the sort of crack Mungold
would paint if he were doing a Humble Interior."

Mungold, the fashionable portrait-painter of the hour, was the
favourite object of the younger men's irony.

"It only needs Kate Arran to be borne in dying," Stanwell continued
with a laugh. "Much more likely to be poor little Caspar, though,"
he concluded.

His neighbour across the landing--the little sculptor, Caspar Arran,
humorously called "Gasper" on account of his bronchial asthma--had
lately been joined by a sister, Kate Arran, a strapping girl, fresh
from the country, who had installed herself in the little room off
her brother's studio, keeping house for him with a chafing-dish and
a coffee-machine, to the mirth and envy of the other young men in
the building.

Poor little Gasper had been very bad all the autumn, and it was
surmised that his sister's presence, which he spoke of growlingly,
as a troublesome necessity devolved on him by the inopportune death
of an aunt, was really an indication of his failing ability to take
care of himself. Kate Arran took his complaints with unfailing
good-humour, darned his socks, brushed his clothes, fed him with
steaming broths and foaming milk-punches, and listened with
reverential assent to his interminable disquisitions on art. Every
one in the house was sorry for little Gasper, and the other fellows
liked him all the more because it was so impossible to like his