I knew squads of the right sort, some who rolled in dollars in houses
up by the Park, and others who lived with the gas turned down mostly
around Washington Square--artists and writers and so forth. Brainy
coves.

Corky was one of the artists. A portrait-painter, he called himself,
but he hadn't painted any portraits. He was sitting on the side-lines
with a blanket over his shoulders, waiting for a chance to get into the
game. You see, the catch about portrait-painting--I've looked into the
thing a bit--is that you can't start painting portraits till people
come along and ask you to, and they won't come and ask you to until
you've painted a lot first. This makes it kind of difficult for a
chappie. Corky managed to get along by drawing an occasional picture
for the comic papers--he had rather a gift for funny stuff when he got
a good idea--and doing bedsteads and chairs and things for the
advertisements. His principal source of income, however, was derived
from biting the ear of a rich uncle--one Alexander Worple, who was in
the jute business. I'm a bit foggy as to what jute is, but it's
apparently something the populace is pretty keen on, for Mr. Worple had
made quite an indecently large stack out of it.

Now, a great many fellows think that having a rich uncle is a pretty
soft snap: but, according to Corky, such is not the case. Corky's uncle
was a robust sort of cove, who looked like living for ever. He was
fifty-one, and it seemed as if he might go to par. It was not this,
however, that distressed poor old Corky, for he was not bigoted and had
no objection to the man going on living. What Corky kicked at was the
way the above Worple used to harry him.

Corky's uncle, you see, didn't want him to be an artist. He didn't