Yet, strangely enough, Tommy Locke himself affected the manner of the comic paper artist—at least, to a degree.
He wore his black hair a bit longer than other men, he wore his big round glasses with very heavy tortoise-shell frames, and he wore his collar soft and loose, with a flowing Windsor tie, usually black.
He was chaffed a bit now and then as to his inconsistencies, but it was generally admitted futile to try to get a rise out of old Tommy.
In fact he calmly stated that his get-up was the only real claim he had to being one of the noble army of artists, and Henry Post had glanced at the misty landscapes and murmured, “Some of your titles show latent talent, I think.”
“It’s so nice to be understood!” Locke had exclaimed. “Yes, I’ll say my ‘Monotony in Sagebrush’ is both meanful and catching.”
“If that’s all you want you may well have called it ‘The Mumps,’” Kate Vallon had reported.
These three and another, one Pearl Jane Cutler, formed a sort of chummy quartette, and, though they chummed but seldom, they did most of it in Tommy’s non-committal studio.
“If you’d have a splash of color over that blank looking window,” Kate would suggest, and Tommy would wave away the suggestion without a word.
Then would Pearl Jane, who was remarkably suggestive of Little Annie in Enoch Arden, say, plaintively, “I like it all—just as it is,” and Tommy’s beaming smile would be for her.
They had all finished laughing at her baptismal absurdity—she had been named for the two neighbors on either side of her mother’s house—and without a nickname, they
