The Company She Keeps by Mary McCarthy

month later a short man with a broken nose came into the gallery.
    I had nearly forgotten about the Bierman affair. For a few days after Mr. Sheer had delivered the diamonds, we had discussed it as if it were a party we had gone to. But then a neurotic schnauzer had arrived from the West, and we were back in the dog-crystal business. And when the case was finished, it was utterly finished. We never saw or heard of any of the people again. Mr. Sheer could shut off sections of his life, as a submarine can shut off compartments, and still survive. The effect was so startling as to make you believe that the sections had never been real in the first place, that not only was there no Carew, but there was no girl, there were no diamonds. But this is impossible.
    I preferred at the time not to delve into Mr. Sheer’s version of the story, but to believe that he had somehow, unintentionally, got himself into a terrible quandary, and that, with my help, he had extricated himself honorably and would never lapse again. All my efforts were bent on keeping Mr. Sheer in a state of grace, and I stood guard over him as fiercely, as protectively and nervously, as if he had been a reformed drunkard. And, like the drunkard’s wife, I exuded optimism and respectability.
    This particular morning Mr. Sheer was out, but the broken nose and the checked suit the visitor was wearing told me at once that he was not a customer but a friend of Mr. Sheer’s. He spoke cordially to Elmer, looked appreciatively at all the things, and asked after business. Business was all right, I said, and my character of the cheerful secretary compelled me to add, “Mr. Sheer has sold quite a few things lately!”
    “Yes? I’m in the dog business myself, have been since I left the ring. People aren’t buying dogs, so I’m surprised to hear that they’re buying anything.”
    There was an unanswerable skepticism in the man’s tone, and I silently began to type a letter. I could hear him walking inquisitively about.
    “Say, you don’t remember a bronze he used to have? A big thing, Custer’s Last Stand, what became of it?”
    Elmer coughed violently in the corner.
    “Oh,” I said, happy to find myself on safe ground, “he sold that a long time ago.”
    “That’s fine. I hope he got a good price for it.”
    “Pretty good,” I admitted.
    He left almost at once, telling me to have Mr. Sheer call him. I was proceeding with the form letter I was typing (“I want you to be among the first to see a tapestry I have just received from abroad. I enclose a photograph, which, of course, can only give you the barest notion of the beauty of the original. This remarkable medieval subject” …), when Elmer’s voice came weakly from the corner.
    “Miss Sargent, I think I better tell you. That man is the owner of that bronze.”
    My hands dropped from the keys.
    “You mean that Mr. Sheer sold it and then didn’t tell him? ”
    Elmer nodded.
    “It’s too bad,” he said, “it had to be him. He used to be the welterweight contender.”
    When he heard the news, Mr. Sheer did not rebuke me. It was bound to happen, he said. But he would have to pay up instantly, and pay not the six hundred dollars he had received for it but eight, which was the value the welterweight contender had originally set on his art treasure.
    “Elmer thinks he’s going to beat you up,” I said.
    “No,” said Mr. Sheer, and a ruminative smile lit up his pale, sharp face. “You know, Miss Sargent, it’s a funny thing, with all the crooked things I’ve done nobody’s ever taken a sock at me. Why do you suppose that is?”
    “I don’t know, Mr. Sheer,” I said sadly.
    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