"In life and in art," he said, "all that matters is an inevitable ending." 🔊

"But," I urged more hopefully than I felt, "an ending that can be avoided isn’t inevitable." 🔊

"You aren't an artist," he rasped. 🔊 "And you're so hopelessly not an artist that, so far from being able to imagine a thing and make it seem true, you're going to make even a true thing seem as if you'd made it up. 🔊 You're a miserable bungler. And it's like my luck." 🔊

I protested that the miserable bungler was not I, was not going to be I, but T. K. Nupton; 🔊 and we had a rather heated argument, in the thick of which it suddenly seemed to me that Soames saw he was in the wrong: he had quite physically cowered. 🔊 But I wondered why—and now I guessed with a cold throb just why—he stared so past me. 🔊 The bringer of that "inevitable ending" filled the doorway. 🔊

I managed to turn in my chair and to say, not without a semblance of lightness, "Aha, come in!" 🔊 Dread was indeed rather blunted in me by his looking so absurdly like a villain in a melodrama. 🔊 The sheen of his tilted hat and of his shirt-front, the repeated twists he was giving to his mustache, and most of all the magnificence of his sneer, gave token that he was there only to be foiled. 🔊

He was at our table in a stride. 🔊 "I am sorry," he sneered witheringly, "to break up your pleasant party, but—" 🔊

"You don't; you complete it," I assured him. 🔊 "Mr. Soames and I want to have a little talk with you. 🔊 Won't you sit? 🔊 Mr. Soames got nothing, frankly nothing, by his journey this afternoon. 🔊 We don't wish to say that the whole thing was a swindle, a common swindle. 🔊 On the contrary, we believe you meant well. 🔊 But of course the bargain, such as it was, is off." 🔊