, with all her real or fancied delight in noting
the jealousies and weaknesses of men and women, could hear no words of
detraction or even dispraise.

"Is the painter here?" she asked of her companion in a whisper.

"No; I haven't seen him. Perhaps he'll come in later on."

"Would you think it cheap cynicism if I were to ask why they all praise
the picture--why they don't find any fault with it?"

"Oh, because they are all of the school, and they must support their
creed. Our art is a creed to us. I don't admit that I am of Delavar's
school any more; in fact, I look upon him as a heretic. He is going in
for mere popularity; success has spoilt him. But to most of these
people here he is still a divinity. They haven't found him out yet."

"Oh!"

This little exclamation broke from Minola as some people at length
struggled their way outward, and allowed her to see the whole of the
picture.

"What is it called?" she asked.

"Love stronger than death."

The scene was a graveyard, under a sickly yellow moon, rising in a
livid and greenish sky. A little to the left of the spectator was seen
a freshly-opened grave. In the foreground were two figures--one that of
a dead girl, whom her lover had just haled from her coffin, wrapped as
she was in her cerements of the tomb; the other that of the lover. He
had propped the body against the broken hillock of the grave, and he
was chanting a love-song to it which he accompanied on his lute. His
face suggested the last stage of a galloping consumption, further
enlivened by the fearsome light of insanity in his eyes. Some dreary
bats flopped and lollopped through the air, and a few sympathetic toads
came out to listen to the lay of the lover. The cypresses appeared as
if they swayed and moaned to the music; and the rank weeds and grasses
were mournfully tremulous around the sandalled feet of the forlorn
musician.

Minola at first could not keep from shuddering. Then there followed a
shocking inclination to laugh.

"What do you think of it?" Blanchet asked.

"Oh, I don't like it at all."

"No? It is trivial. Mere prettiness; just a striving after drawing-room
popularity. No depth of feeling; no care for the realistic power of the
scene. Pretty, pleasing--nothing more. Surface only; no depth."

"But it is hideous," Minola said.

"Hideous? Oh, no! Decay is loveliness; decay is the soul of really high
art when you come to understand it. But there is no real decay there.
Tha