"Yes, it's perfectly simple," he said. "I see what it is. I did it for a dog of my own once. It's quite instantaneous: he won't feel anything."
"And when?" said Joyce piteously, as if demanding a respite.
"I think now," said Charles. "He's dying: he won't know anything."
Joyce bit her lip, but nodded to him. Then she bent down over the sofa once more, and kissed Buz on his nose, and on the top of his head. Then without looking at Charles again she went out of the room.
This aroused Buz, but before many minutes were past he had dozed off again. Then Charles filled the little syringe, wiped the end of it, so that the bitterness should not startle him, and gently pushing back the loose-skinned corner of his lip he inserted the nozzle, and discharged it. A little shiver went through the dog, and he stretched out his legs, and then moved no more at all.
Charles went to the door, and found Joyce standing outside.
"It's all over," he said. "Buz felt nothing whatever."
Joyce was not up to speaking, but she took his hand between both of hers, pressing it.
A dark October day with slanting flows of peevish rain tattooing on the big north window of Charles' new studio, was drawing to a chill and early close, and the light was rapidly becoming too bad to paint. His mother, at whose picture he had been working all day, was sitting in front of the plain deal table from his old studio, with fingers busily rattling on her typewriter, and Charles had put his easel on the model's-stand and worked from this elevation, since the figure in the picture was looking upwards. It was nearing completion, and the last steps which were costing him so much biting of the ends of his brushes, and so continual a frown that it seemed doubtful if his forehead could ever again lose its corrugations, were being taken, and his progress which up till now had been so triumphantly uninterrupted was beginning to shuffle and mark time. Admirable though the wistful welcoming love in her face was, thrice admirable as Craddock had thought it, Charles knew now it did not completely represent what he saw. All day he had been working at it, making his patient model keep rising and looking at him, and not only was he dissatisfied with the inadequacy of it, but he knew that he was losing the simplicity and brilliance of his earlier work on it. Hence these knottings in his forehead, and the marks of teeth in the handles of his brushes.