afraid."

"The slower the better, monsieur. London is so beautiful in the dark.
It is the despair of the painter--these moonlit nights. There are
moments when one feels that reality does not exist. All is in
dreams--like the face of that young lady."

Fort stared sharply round at him. "Oh! She strikes you like that, does
she?"

"Ah! What a charming figure! What an atmosphere of the past and future
round her! And she will not let me paint her! Well, perhaps only
Mathieu Maris." He raised his broad Bohemian hat, and ran his fingers
through his hair.

"Yes," said Fort, "she'd make a wonderful picture. I'm not a judge of
Art, but I can see that."

The painter smiled, and went on in his rapid French:

"She has youth and age all at once--that is rare. Her father is an
interesting man, too; I am trying to paint him; he is very difficult. He
sits lost in some kind of vacancy of his own; a man whose soul has gone
before him somewhere, like that of his Church, escaped from this age of
machines, leaving its body behind--is it not? He is so kind; a saint, I
think. The other clergymen I see passing in the street are not at all
like him; they look buttoned-up and busy, with faces of men who might be
schoolmasters or lawyers, or even soldiers--men of this world. Do you
know this, monsieur--it is ironical, but it is true, I think a man cannot
be a successful priest unless he is a man of this world. I do not see
any with that look of Monsieur Pierson, a little tortured within, and not
quite present. He is half an artist, really a lover of music, that man.
I am painting him at the piano; when he is playing his face is alive, but
even then, so far away. To me, monsieur, he is exactly like a beautiful
church which knows it is being deserted. I find him pathetic. Je suis
socialiste, but I have always an aesthetic admiration for that old
Church, which held its children by simple emotion. The times have
changed; it can no longer hold them so; it stands in the dusk, with its
spire to a heaven which exists no more, its bells, still beautiful but
out of tune with the music of the streets. It is something of that which
I wish to get into my picture of Monsieur Pierson; and sapristi! it is
difficult!" Fort grunted assent. So far as he could make out the
painter's words, it seemed to him a large order.

"To do it, you see," went on the painter, "one should have the proper
background--these currents of modern life an