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“Take that rotten thing out of your window this very instant,” Cornelia Stedman said to Sylvia Lazarro.

“Take what out of my window?” said Sylvia.

“Take that clipping out of your window,” said Cornelia.

“What about the clipping?” said Sylvia.

“You know what about the clipping,” said Cornelia.

Lazarro heard the women’s voices rising. The voices sounded harmless enough at first—merely business-like. But each sentence ended on a slightly higher note.

Lazarro reached the door of the studio just in time to witness the moment before the break of a fight between two nice women—between two nice women pushed too far. The clouds that seemed to hang over Cornelia and Sylvia weren’t wet and massive. They were a luminous, poisonous green.

“You mean,” said Sylvia crisply, “the part of the clipping that says your husband is a humbug or the part that says my husband is great?”

The storm broke.

The women didn’t touch each other. They stood apart and whaled away with awful truths. And no matter what they yelled, they didn’t hurt each other at all. The mad joy of a battle finally joined improved them both.

It was the husbands who were being dilapidated. Every time Cornelia hurled a taunt, it hit Lazarro hard. She knew him for the clumsy fraud he was.

Lazarro glanced at Stedman, saw that Stedman winced and sucked in air every time Sylvia let a good gibe fly.

When the fight entered its declining phase, the women’s words were clearer, more deliberate.

“Do you honestly think my husband couldn’t paint a silly old picture of an Indian in a birch-bark canoe or a cabin in a valley?” said Sylvia Lazarro. “He could do it without even thinking! He paints the way he paints because he’s too honest to copy old calendars.”

“You really think my husband couldn’t paint big hunks of glunk just any which way, and think up some fancy name for it?” said Cornelia Stedman. “You think he couldn’t ook and gook paint around so’s one of your high muckety-muck critic friends would come around and look at the mess and say, ‘Now there’s what I call real soul’? You really think that?”

“You bet I think that,” said Sylvia.

“You want to have a little contest?” said Cornelia.

“Anything you say,” said Sylvia.

“All righty,” said Cornelia. “Tonight your husband’ll do a picture of something that really looks like something, and tonight my husband’ll paint with what you call soul.” She tossed her gray head. “And we’ll just see who eats crow tomorrow.”

“You’re on,” said Sylvia happily. “You’re on.”

* * *

“Just squook the old paint on,” said Cornelia Stedman. She felt marvelous, looked twenty years younger. She was looking over her husband’s shoulder.

Stedman was seated bleakly before a blank canvas.

Cornelia picked up a tube of paint, squeezed it hard, laid a vermilion worm on the canvas. “All righty,” she said, “now you take it from there.” Stedman picked up a brush listlessly, did nothing with it. He knew he was going to fail.

He had been living cheerfully with artistic failure for years. He had managed to coat it with the sugar of ready cash. But now he was sure that his failure was going to be presented to him so nakedly, so dramatically, that he could only take it for the ghastly thing it was.

He did not doubt that Lazarro was now creating across the street a painting so well drawn, so vibrant, that even Cornelia and the demonstration crowds would be struck dumb. And Stedman would be so shamed that he would never touch a brush again.

He looked everywhere but at the canvas, studied the paintings and signs on the studio walls as though he had never seen them before. “A ten percent deposit holds anything Stedman does,” said a sign. “At no extra charge,” said a sign, “Stedman will work the colors of a customer’s drapes, carpet, and upholstery into a sunset.”

“Stedman,” said a sign, “will make a genuine oil painting from any photograph.” Stedman found himself wondering who this bustling Stedman was.

Stedman now considered Stedman’s work. One theme occurred in every painting—a cunning