the best picture I'll ever paint. I won't even show it to my wife. She would sell it to a Dutch banker and invest the proceeds in Roumanian oil or Brazilian coffee. It deserves a better fate."
He restored it to its place in the rack and Grover held in his mind a vivid image of it which he tried in vain, now that he was self-conscious about it, to analyze. Apart from the fact that it had stirred him deeply, making him feel half sick and half excited, the painting was meaningless enough. The central object in the composition he could only have described as a cross between a dynamo and a jelly-fish: something that resembled a bulbous piece of machinery floating at the bottom of a cloudy sea, in which grew soft spindley objects like highly magnified moss-flowers, waving about and reaching up toward some unseen, but potent influence, possibly some sun, possibly some purely symbolic goal.
"What I want to know," he finally said, "Is how you can explain that as a pure and simple duet between you and an object, with everything between you and it eliminated."
The painter burst into his butcher's laugh. "Il est malin, le gosse!" he remarked, with a note of fatherliness. "Would you understand it any better if I told you that the painting is a pure and simple duet between me and an object held in remembrance from a dream twenty years old?"
"Not at all," replied Grover. "In fact that compli-
