That grows beside the gate of unseen things."

Among friends, parting for a lengthy spell has its disadvantages. They
age in character and physique, and after the reconnoitre there is a
pathetic consciousness of the grudging confessions which time has
inscribed on the monumental palimpsest. My meeting with Bentham after a
severance of years was bleak with this pathos. But he was gay as ever,
and better dressed than he used to be in the old art school days, with a
self-respecting adjustment of hat and necktie that had been unknown in
Bohemia; for he was no longer a boy, but a man, and a noted one, and
fortune had stroked him into sleekness. The gender of success must be
feminine: she is so capricious. Hitherto her smiles have been for
veterans grown hoary in doing; now she opens her arms for youngsters
grown great merely by daring. Bentham, it must be owned, had dared
uncommonly well, and success had pillowed his head in her lap while she
twined the bay with her fingers. But lines round his mouth and fatigued
cynicism on the eyelids betrayed the march of years, and, more, the
thinker, who, like most thinkers, plumbs to exhaustion in a bottomless
pit. For all that he was excellent company. On his walls hung
innumerable trophies of foreign travel and unique specimens of his own
art-bent and with these, by gesture or by anecdote, he gave an
unconscious synopsis of the skipped pages in our friendship's volume.

"This," he said, "is the original of 'Earth's Fair Daughters,' the
canvas that brought me to the front; and here"--handing an album--"is
the presentment of my benefactress."

"Benefactress?" I queried.

"Yes. I don't attempt to pad you with the social tarra-diddle that
genius finds nuggets on the surface of the diggings. Fame was due to
myself, and fortune to Mrs Brune--a dear old creature who bought my
pictures with a persistence worthy a better cause. She died, leaving me
her sole heir."

"And hence these travels?"

"Yes. When I lost sight of you in Paris I hewed a new route to notice. I
played at being successful, bought my own pictures through
dealers--_incog._, of course--at enormous prices. That tickled the ears
of the Press."

"But how about commission?"

"Oh, the dealers earned it, and my money was well invested. I became
talked about. The public knew nothing of my talent, and people love to
talk of what they understand least."

"You belittle yourself, Bentham. You felt your work was sound--tha