e presence of a dozen others, characterised
him as "one of those passively selfish snobs whose virtues are all
negative and whose modesty is the mental complacency of an underdone
capon."

He was sharply rebuked by Ogilvy, Annan, and Burleson; skilfully by
Querida--so adroitly indeed that his amiable and smiling apology for the
absent painter produced a curiously depressing effect upon Ogilvy and
Annan, and even left John Burleson dully uncomfortable, although Allaire
had been apparently well drubbed.

"All the same," said Allaire with a sneer to Querida after the others
had departed, "Neville is really a most frightful snob. Like a busy
bacillus surrounded by a glass tube full of prepared culture, he exists
in his own intellectual exudations perfectly oblivious to the miseries
and joys of the world around him. He hasn't time for anybody except
himself."

Querida laughed: "What has Neville done to you, my friend?"

"To me?" repeated Allaire with a shrug. "Oh, nothing. It isn't that....
All the same when I had my exhibition at the Monson Galleries I went to
him and said, 'See here, Neville, I've got some Shoe-trust and
Button-trust women to pour tea for me. Now you know a lot of fashionable
people and I want my tea-pourers to see them, and I want the papers to
say that they've been to a private view of my exhibition.'

"He gave me one of those absent-treatment stares and said he'd tell all
the really interesting people he knew; and the damnedest lot of scrubby,
dowdy, down-at-the-heels tatterdemalions presented his card at my
private view that you ever saw outside an artist's rathskeller, a lower
Fifth Avenue reception, or a varnishing day! By God, I can go to the
bread-line and get that sort of lookers myself--and I don't care whether
his bunch came from Tenth Street Colonial stock or the Washington Square
nobility or the landed gentry of Chelsea or from the purlieus of the
Bronx, which is where they apparently belong! I can get that kind
myself. I wanted automobiles and broughams and clothes, and I got one
sea-going taxi, and the dirty end of the stick! And to cap the climax he
strolled in himself with a girl whose face is familiar to everybody who
looks at bath tubs in the back of the magazines--Valerie West! And I
want to tell you I couldn't look my Shoe-trust tea-pourers in the face;
and they're so mad that I haven't got an order out of them since."

Querida laughed till the tears stood in his big, velvety, al