No. 182. The Artist's Brain. He had told Abigail--his next-door landscape painter--that he had painted a self-portrait. She was anxious to see it, and hurried into his studio directly upon finishing up a particularly bothersome spruce tree in her current painting. What she found perplexed her. There, propped on his easel, was a very large and, she thought, very dissolute painting, mostly in hot pinks, violets and fleshy oranges, a seething mass of heaving, breathing colour upon which, she found to her dismay, he had scribbled a title: The Artist's Brain. It didn't look like a brain to her. It looked more like the striving chrysalis of some huge moth or butterfly about to be born. She was glad he wasn't there. She didn't want to discuss it with him.