he room. All the world had other occupations on Christmas
afternoon, or preferred the stove-side and the family circle.

Von Francius showed me a picture which he said every one was talking
about.

"Why?" I inquired when I had contemplated it, and failed to find it
lovely.

"The drawing, the grouping, are admirable, as you must see. The art
displayed is wonderful. I find the picture excellent."

"But the subject?" said I.

It was not a large picture, and represented the interior of an artist's
atelier. In the foreground a dissipated-looking young man tilted his
chair backward as he held his gloves in one hand, and with the other
stroked his mustache, while he contemplated a picture standing on an
easel before him. The face was hard, worn, _blase_; the features,
originally good, and even beautiful, had had all the latent loveliness
worn out of them by a wrong, unbeautiful life. He wore a tall hat, very
much to one side, as if to accent the fact that the rest of the company,
upon whom he had turned his back, certainly did not merit that he should
be at the trouble of baring his head to them. And the rest of the
company--a girl, a model, seated on a chair upon a raised dais, dressed
in a long, flounced white skirt, not of the freshest, some kind
of Oriental wrap falling negligently about it--arms, models of
shapeliness, folded, and she crouching herself together as if
wearied, or contemptuous, or perhaps a little chilly. Upon a divan
near her a man--presumably the artist to whom the establishment
pertained--stretched at full length, looking up carelessly into
her face, a pipe in his mouth, with indifference and--scarcely
impertinence--it did not take the trouble to be a fully developed
impertinence--in every gesture. This was the picture; faithful to life,
significant in its very insignificance, before which von Francius sat,
and declared that the drawing, coloring, and grouping were perfect.[B]

[Footnote B: The original is by Charles Herman, of Brussels.]

"The subject?" he echoed, after a pause. "It is only a scrap of
artist-life."

"Is that artist-life?" said I, shrugging my shoulders. "I do not like it
at all; it is common, low, vulgar. There is no romance about it; it only
reminds one of stale tobacco and flat champagne."

"You are too particular," said von Francius, after a pause, and with a
flavor of some feeling which I did not quite understand tincturing his
voice.

For my part, I was looking at the