The story is about the romantic woes of Archie, a painter whose works tend towards the surreal. He confides in Reggie that he hasn't sold a single painting.
...I should have been far more startled if he’d told me he had sold a picture. I’ve seen his pictures, and they are like nothing on earth. So far as I can make out what he says, they aren’t supposed to be. There’s one in particular, called “The Coming of Summer,” which I sometimes dream about when I’ve been hitting it up a shade too vigorously. It’s all dots and splashes, with a great eye staring out of the middle of the mess. It looks as if summer, just as it was on the way, had stubbed its toe on a bomb. He tells me it’s his masterpiece, and that he will never do anything like it again. I should like to have that in writing.
Archie refuses to tell his wife that he draws newspaper comics as well as surreal paintings. This causes problems, because he's getting a steady income from the comics and nothing from the paintings. How can he explain where the money's coming from? Reggie has an idea: say a millionaire has bought "The Coming of Summer" for £2000! What Could Possibly Go Wrong?, after all?
What Archie and I forgot to allow for was the fact that this thing might get into the papers.
The papers put the story on the front page.
Underneath there was a column, some of it about Archie, the rest about the picture; and scattered over the page were two photographs of old Archie, looking more like Pa Doughnut than anything human, and a smudged reproduction of “The Coming of Summer”; and, believe me, frightful as the original of that weird exhibit looked, the reproduction had it licked to a whisper. It was one of the ghastliest things I have ever seen.
Archie's thoughts on the article: "He told me afterwards that even then he had a sense of impending doom. He said he had a presentiment that there was more to come, and that Fate was just backing away and measuring the distance, preparatory to smiting him good and hard."
"My knowledge of chappies in general, after a fairly wide experience, is that some chappies seem to kind of convey an atmosphere of unpleasantness the moment you come into contact with them. I don’t know what it is about them—maybe it’s something in the way they work their eyebrows—but directly you see them you feel that you want to get down into the bomb-proof cellar and lock the door after you."
Archie finally tells his wife about the comics. She loves them, then admits that she's been lying too: she told him she made money from writing poetry, when she actually writes advertisements!
