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“I wanted to die,” said Halvorsen. There were tubes sticking in his arms.

The crag-faced old man let out a contemptuous bellow.

“Sister!” he shouted. “Pull the plasma tubes out before more we waste. He says he wants to die.”

“Hush,” said the nurse. She laid her hand on his brow again.

“Don’t bother with him, Sister,” the old man jeered. “He is a shrinking little flower, too delicate for the great, rough world. He has done nothing, he can do nothing, so he decides to make of himself a nuisance by dying.”

“You lie,” said Halvorsen. “I worked. Good God, how I worked! Nobody wanted my work. They wanted me, to wear in their buttonholes like a flower. They were getting to me. Another year and I wouldn’t have been an artist any more.”

“Ja?” asked the old man. “Tell me about it.”

Halvorsen told him, sometimes weeping with self-pity and weakness, sometimes cursing the old man for not letting him die, sometimes quietly describing this statuette or that portrait head, or raving wildly against the mad folly of the world.