whose heart could no longer flutter, not even when the youthful hero-worshipper was a woman and beautiful.

He dined with Herbert at a little table. His burst of communicativeness had exhausted itself, and he was glad to let the returned traveller do the bulk of the talking as well as of the dining. He himself ate little, though the cuisine was excellent, and the cellar took high rank. Over dinner Herbert bubbled over in endless reminiscences of the rare dishes and vintages he had consumed, the operas and symphonies he had heard, the women who had loved him-a veritable rhapsody of wine, woman, and song. In an access of unmalicious bitterness, like that which had overcome him on the threshold of Herbert's studio, Matthew Strang felt that Herbert was the real Masterthe Master of life.

In the smoking-room other men gathered round. There was Grose, whose colossal canvases were exhibited at a shilling a head with explanatory pamphlets by high ecclesiastical authorities, and there was Thornbury, who succeeded him in the same gallery with colossal nudes that needed no explanation from ecclesiastical authorities.

Matthew introduced Herbert to Trapp, the realistic novelist, and Herbert introduced Matthew to Sir Frederick Boyd, the composer, who related with gusto a story of how he had exposed a cheat at Monte Carlo. A Scotch landscape-painter asked Matthew to recommend him a model. Two Associates joined the group. One was a vigorous painter who painted everything à premier coup, the other was Cornpepper, externally unchanged, save for a round beard.

He had long since cut himself adrift from the Azure Art Club, though he still counted his disciples, whose experimental fumblings in development of his methods he boasted of observ ing in sapient passivity. "Try it on the dog," he used to chuckle to his familiars. "I've done searching-let my imitators search, and risk the bogs and the blind-alleys. If they do strike a path, I'm on the spot instantly to lead them along it. That's the only way one can learn from one's followers." He used to tell with glee how one of them had ruined a picture by putting it out in the rain to mellow it. "Some of those modern

stylists who are trying to discount Old Mastership will survive their pictures," was Cornpepper's commentary on a phase of the "They will leave masterpieces of invisibility."

newer art.

A good many changes had taken place in the Art world since Matthew Strang had first had the felicity of drinking whiskey in Cornpepper's studio. The flowing tide was now with the decorative artists, of whom the "Mack" of that evening had proved a pioneer; the Fishtown school of photographic realism had lived long enough to be orthodox; the Azure Art Club itself was half absorbed by the Academy, and a new formula of revolt was momently expected on the horizon; some said it was to be Primitive, others mysteriously whispered "spots"; tonight Herbert, with mock seriousness, announced that he himself was about to lead a movement, the originality of which consisted in seeing Nature through stained glass. What weird magic a landscape gained when observed through a green or pink window! But he found the men not so willing to talk of principles as in the days of Cornpepper's Bohemian parties, when Carrie with the whiskey bottle stood for the sober club attendant with his tray of liqueur brandies. The conversation was rigidly concrete, except for a moment when Cornpepper nearly came to hot words with the photographic painter who insisted that Nature was always beautiful. The little man, glaring through his monocle and rasping the plush arm-chair with his nails, insisted that this was sheer cant, one had only to look in the glass to see how ugly Nature could sometimes be! Selection was the only excuse for Art. Random transcripts from Nature were as foolish as the excesses of the Neo-Japanese school, into which the Azure Art Gallery had degenerated. But this lapse of Cornpepper's into his early manner was brief. Recovering himself, he told a malicious anecdote about an artist who was taking to etching because his eyesight was failing, and he explained the domesticity of British Art by the objection of artists' wives to all models except babies. Everybody knew, he said, why Carruthers had been driven to landscape and Christmas supplements. "Depend upon it," dogmatized the little man with. his most owlish air of wisdom, "the man who marries his model is lost. She will never tolerate a model on the premises again."

His fellow-Associate told a story of a stock-broker who had got himself invited to the Greenwich dinner last year, and had asked Erle-Smith to give him the sketch of passing barges which the great man had pencilled on his sketch-book after dinner. "Erle-Smith good-naturedly gave it to him. This year he was there again, and said with proud respect to Erle-Smith, I've still got that sketch.' And produced it crumpled up from his waistcoat pocket!"

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Yes, but did you hear Vanbrugh's mot?" asked Trapp. "He said, Naturally; being a financier he doubled it.'"

"Why, I said that!" cried Cornpepper, angrily.

"No doubt," said Herbert. "It's a well-known chestnut." "Then I pulled it out of the fire," screamed Cornpepper. Somebody exhibited another sketch, grotesquely indecorous, by a popular painter of religious masterpieces, and the latest epigram on the divorce case of the hour was repeated and enjoyed. But Matthew Strang's laughter held no merriment.

"Shall you be at the Academy soirée ?" he asked Trapp, to turn the conversation.

"No, I don't care for crowds," replied the realistic novelist. The conversation rambled on. The composer drifted away, and a full-fledged Academician took his place-an elderly, dandified figure with a languid drawl, an aristocratic manner caught from his sitters, and a shoulder-shrugging contempt for Continental Art; in despite of which Matthew Strang protested mildly against the bad hanging at Burlington House of a portrait by an eminent Frenchman. Cornpepper talked of a sale at Christie's at which most of the pictures had fetched lower prices than was given for them by their last owners.

"It's all a spec'," said Herbert; "there's no such thing as a fixed value in a work of art. Everything depends on the artist's pose. The more the buyer gives for a picture the more he likes it. It's a game of brag. Set up a fine establishment-the dealer will pay. My old governor was a good deal taken in by pretentious humbugs with pals in the press." As the Academician's own establishment was notoriously finer than his pictures—a fact of which the wandering Herbert was ignorant-Matthew Strang hastened to speak of Tarmigan, who had been recalled to mem