If you want a decent
person"--she spoke with a slightly ironical intonation--"go and see what
Garstin can do with decency."

"I will."

And he walked over to the side of the room opposite to the grand piano,
and went to stand in front of the easel she had indicated. She stood
where she was and watched him. For two or three minutes he looked at the
picture in silence, and she thought his expression had become slightly
hostile. His audacious and rather thick lips were set together firmly,
almost too firmly. His splendid figure supple, athletic and harmonious,
looked almost rigid. She wondered what he was feeling, whether he
disliked the portrait of the judge of the Criminal Court at which he was
looking. Finally he said:

"I think Mr. Dick Garstin is a humorist. Do not you?"

"But--why?"

"To put this gentleman in the midst of all the law breakers."

Miss Van Tuyn crossed the room and joined him in front of the picture,
which showed the judge seated in his wig and robes.

"And that is not all," added Arabian. "This man's business is to judge
others, naughty people who do God knows what, and, it seems, have to be
punished sometimes. Is it not?"

"Yes, to be sure."

"But Mr. Dick Garstin when painting him is saying to himself all the
time, 'And he is naughty, too! And who is going to put on wig and red
clothes and tell him he, too, deserves a few months of prison?' Now is
not that true, mademoiselle? Is not that man bad underneath the judge's
skin? And has not Mr. Dick Garstin found this out, and does not he use
all his cleverness to show it?"

Miss Van Tuyn looked at Arabian with a stronger interest than any she
had shown yet. It was quite true. Garstin had a peculiar faculty for
getting at the lower parts of a character and for bringing it to the
surface in his portraits. Perhaps in the exercise of this faculty he
showed his ingrained cynicism, sometimes even his malice. Arabian had,
it seemed, immediately discovered the painter's predominant quality as a
psychologist of the brush.

"You are quite right," she said. "One feels that someone ought to judge
that judge."

"That is more than a portrait of one man," said Arabian. "It is a
portrait of the world's hypocrisy."

In saying this his usually soft voice suddenly took on an almost biting
tone.

"The question is," he added, "whether one wishes to be painted as bad
when perhaps one is not so bad. Many people, I think, might fear to be
painted by this ve