The word was out at last. I was gratified in a way that Mr. Sheer had admitted the truth, but depressed by the casual, accidental manner in which it had slipped out, as if that “crooked” were taken for granted by Mr. Sheer, accepted by him as an unalterable part of his personality. My vision of a reformed, transfigured Mr. Sheer began reluctantly to dissolve, as I perceived that there was no possibility of reform because there was no practical basis for it, because, in other words (and now I knew it), there was no merchandise. I saw the nub of Mr. Sheer’s business tragedy: he was continually being forced, by the impatience of a creditor, to sell somebody else’s property below cost. In order to make good in the Bierman case he had had to sell an eight-hundred-dollar bronze for six hundred, and to make good for the bronze he would have to sell a thousand-dollar tapestry for eight hundred, and to make good for that he would have to sell a twelve-hundred-dollar chalice for a thousand, and so on—in short, every time he sold a picture he not only ran the risk of a jail sentence, but he lost money. Of course, in reality, it was not Mr. Sheer who lost money (since he had none to lose); it was always the last creditor who was the potential loser, and if that chain of debt were ever to break, it would be the ultimate creditor who would have to bear the accumulated losses. Mr. Sheer did not allow himself to imagine that the chain could break; rather, he looked forward to a time when by a Big Sale he would loosen it voluntarily; meanwhile he clung to it as a lifebelt. “If I can only keep two jumps ahead of the sheriff, I’ll be all right,” he said.

When he passed into the final stage of his business development and became a partner, Mr. Sheer achieved his ambition—to enter a rich man’s house by the front door, as a guest. First there had been stag evenings with visiting Middle Western businessmen, but before long, at Aiken, at Palm Beach, on Long Island, Mr. Sheer would now and then be included in the larger cocktail parties. Deeply as he desired these invitations, he could only enjoy them in anticipation and in retrospect. The parties themselves were torture for him. His fear of committing a solecism combined with his shyness in crowds to bleach his conversation to an unnatural neutrality. On the offensive, he restricted himself to the most general statements about politics, the weather, the women’s dresses, the state of business; on the defensive, he held off his interlocutor with all the Really’s and You-don’t-say’s and the Well-isn’t-that-interesting’s of the would-be Good Listener.

happily obliterate what he felt were picayune distinctions between period replicas and originals by a master

As time passed, it became increasingly difficult for Mr. Sheer to regard his life as an imposture. He still believed that he could “be himself with me, but actually our conversations were more and more taken up with politics, the weather, the women’s dresses, the state of business, till the outlaw Mr. Sheer I dined with was practically indistinguishable from the Mr. Sheer one met at the gallery or at a hunt breakfast somewhere in New Jersey. It was plain, at last, that Mr. Sheer had not imposed on the business world and used it for his own delight, but that the business world had used Mr. Sheer, rejecting the useless or outmoded parts of him. He had not, as he first thought, outwitted anybody, but he had somehow, imperceptibly, been outwitted himself.

He had a love affair with his best client’s wife, and he played the stock market. Both of these ventures he pursued with a terrible listlessness. He could hardly bother to follow his stocks in the newspaper, or to telephone the lady for whom he was risking so much. It was only when his broker sold him out, and when he brought the lady home to her husband with her evening dress wrong-side-out, that his spirits revived, and he would dwell on the two misfortunes with his old rueful delight.

The Hermitage Galleries, however, saw him through, and the client, who had been looking for a pretext to break with his wife, readily forgave him. Mr. Sheer grew more despondent than ever, and his health began to worry him. He had a masseur in the morning, and he went to a gymnasium in the evening; he subjected himself to basal-metabolism tests, urinalyses, blood counts, took tonics to pep him up and bromides to quiet him and was still, unaccountably, tired. Last year they took out his appendix and his teeth; when he recovered, he had not lost that daily, dragging fatigue, but only acquired an appetite for the knife.

I saw him off to the hospital recently to have his gall bladder removed.

“It’s a very dangerous operation, Margaret; it may be the death of me,” he said.

And for the first time in many weeks he giggled irrepressibly.