urchase
port-wine and game was not in this case a mitigating circumstance.
Stanwell knew that the Arrans really preferred him to Mungold, but the
knowledge only sharpened his envy of the latter, whose friendship could
command visible tokens of expression, while poor Stanwell's remained
gloomily inarticulate. As he returned to his over-populated studio and
surveyed anew the pictures of which Shepson had not offered to relieve
him, he found himself wishing, not for Mungold's lack of scruples, for
he believed him to be the most scrupulous of men, but for that happy
mean of talent which so completely satisfied the artistic requirements
of the inartistic. Mungold was not to be despised as an apostate--he
was to be congratulated as a man whose aptitudes were exactly in line
with the taste of the persons he liked to dine with.

At this point in his meditations, Stanwell's eye fell on the portrait
of Miss Gladys Glyde. It was really, as Shepson said, as good as a
Mungold; yet it could never be made to serve the same purpose, because
it was the work of a man who knew it was bad art. That at least would
have been Caspar Arran's contention--poor Caspar, who produced as bad
art in the service of the loftiest convictions! The distinction began
to look like mere casuistry to Stanwell. He had never been very proud
of his own adaptability. It had seemed to him to indicate the lack of
an individual stand-point, and he had tried to counteract it by the
cultivation of an aggressively personal style. But the cursed knack was
in his fingers--he was always at the mercy of some other man's
sensations, and there were moments when he blushed to remember that his
grandfather had spent a laborious life-time in Rome, copying the Old
Masters for a generation which lacked the facile resource of the
camera. Now, however, it struck him that the ancestral versatility
might be a useful inheritance. In art, after all, the greatest of them
did what they could; and if a man could do several things instead of
one, why should he not profit by the multiplicity of his gifts? If one
had two talents why not serve two masters?

III

STANWELL, while seeing Caspar through the attack which had been the
cause of his sister's arrival, had struck up a friendship with the
young doctor who climbed the patient's seven flights with unremitting
fidelity. The two, since then, had continued to exchange confidences
regarding the sculptor's health, and Stanwell, anxious to