a man. He has taste.'

'Taste!' exclaimed Miss Harris, violently, and from the corners of her
mouth I gathered that I had said one of those things which she would
store up and produce to prove that I was not, for all my pretensions, a
person of the truest feeling. 'He sees things.'

'There's an intensity,' I ventured.

'That's better. Yes, an intensity. A perfect passion of colour. Look at
that.' She indicated a patch of hillsides perhaps six inches by four, in
which the light seemed to come and go as it does in a sapphire.

We stood and gazed. It was a tremendous thing; only half a dozen studies
with feeling and knowledge in them, but there in that remote fastness
thrice barred against the arts a tremendous thing, a banquet for our
famished eyes. What they would have said to us in London is a different
matter, and how good they really were I do not find the courage to
pronounce, but they had merit enough to prick our sense of beauty
delightfully where we found them--oh, they were good!

'Heaven send it isn't a Tommy,' said Dora, with a falling countenance.
'There is something absolutely inaccessible about a Tommy.'

'How could it be?' I asked.

'Oh, there are some inspired ones. But it isn't--that's French
technique. It's an Englishman or an American who has worked in Paris.
What in the name of fortune is he doing here?'

'Oh,' I said, 'we have had them, you know. Val Prinsep came out at the
time of the Prince of Wales's visit.'

'Do you remember that?'

'It's a matter of history,' I said, evasively, 'and Edwin Weeks
travelled through India not so many years ago. I saw his studio in Paris
afterward. Between his own canvases and Ahmedabad balconies and Delhi
embroideries and Burmese Buddhas and other things he seemed to have
carried off the whole place.'

'But they don't come up here ever. They come in the cold weather, and
as they can get plenty of snow and ice at home, they stay down in the
plains with the palm-trees.'

'Precisely; they do,' I said.

'And besides,' Dora went on, with increasing excitement, 'this isn't
a master. You see, he doesn't send a single picture--only these tiny
things. And there's a certain tentativeness'--Miss Harris, her parasol
handle pressed against her lips, looked at me with an eagerness that was
a pleasure to look at in itself.

'A certain weakness, almost a lack of confidence, in the drawing,' I
said.

'What does that signify?'

'Why, immaturity, of course--not eno