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of a passerby looked vividly familiar; it was the handsomely sculpted head alone, for otherwise Jack Fredericks had quite blended in. He was dressed completely in leather and wool, and even thehaircut framing his amazed gape of recognition had the heavy British form. Eerie reunions are common among Americans abroad, but Leonard had never before been hailed from this far in the past. It offended him to have his privacy, built during so many painful weeks of loneliness, unceremoniously crashed; yet he was pleased to be discovered with a companion so handsome. “Jack, this is Miss Robin Cox; Robin, Jack Fredericks. Jack is from my home town, Wheeling.”
    “Wheeling, in what state?” the girl asked.
    “West Virginia.” Jack smiled. “It’s rather like your Black Country.”
    “More green than black,” Leonard said.
    Jack guffawed. “Good old literal Len,” he told Robin. His small moist eyes sought in vain to join hers in a joke over their mutual friend. He and Leonard had never been on a “Len” basis. Had they been on the streets of Wheeling, neither one would have stopped walking.
    “What are you doing here?” Leonard asked him.
    “Reading ec at Jesus; but you’re the one who baffles me. You’re
not
at the university surely?”
    “Sort of. We’re both at the Constable School of Art. It’s affiliated.”
    “I’ve never
heard
of it!” Jack laughed out loud, for which Leonard was grateful, since Robin further stiffened.
    She said, “It’s in a wing of the Ash. It’s a very serious place.”
    “Is it
really?
Well, I must come over sometime and see this remarkable institution. I’m rather interested in painting right now.”
    Leonard said, feeling safe, “Sure. Come on over. Any time. We have to get back now and make a still life out of these onions.”
    “Well, aren’t you full of tricks? You know,” Jack said to thegirl, “Len was a year older than I in public school and I’m used to looking up at him.”
    To this preposterous lie Robin coolly replied with another: “Oh, at Connie we all look up to him.”
    The Constable School could not afford to waste its precious space on still lifes, and imposed upon the museum’s good nature by setting them up in the Well, a kind of basement with a skylight. Here hard-to-classify casts were stashed. Here a great naturalistic boar reclined on his narrow tufted bottom, the Dying Gaul sunned himself in the soft light sifting from above like dust, Winged Victory hoisted her battered feathers; and a tall hermaphrodite, mutilated by Byzantine piety, posed behind a row of brutal Roman portrait busts. The walls were a strange gay blue; even more strangely gay were the five or six students, foreshortened into chipper, quick shapes, chirping around tables of brilliant fruit. As he followed his friend’s blond hair down the reverberating iron of the spiral stairs, Leonard felt he had at last arrived at the radiant heart of the school.
    Nowhere in the museum was there as much light as in the Well. Their intimacy in the grocer’s shop seemed clarified and enhanced here, and pointed by artistic purpose. With minute care they arranged the elements upon a yellow cloth. Robin’s white hands fussed imperiously with the cabbage, tearing off leaf after leaf until she had reduced it to a roundness she imagined would be simple to draw. After lunch they began to mark with charcoal their newly bought canvases, which smelled of glue and fresh wood. To have her, some distance from his side, echoing his task, and to know that her eyes concentrated into the same set of shapes, which after a little concentration took on an unnatural intensity, like fruitin Paradise, curiously enlarged his sense of his physical size; he seemed to tower above the flagstones, and his voice, in responding to her erratic exclamations and complaints, resonated in the bright Well. The other students on still life also worked solemnly, and in the afternoon there were few of them. The sounds of museum