in which he had even painted a young duchess. It was the peculiar
merit of his pictures,--so at least said the art-loving world,--that
though the likeness was always good, the stiffness of the modern
portrait was never there. There was also ever some story told in
Dalrymple's pictures over and above the story of the portraiture.
This countess was drawn as a fairy with wings, that countess as
a goddess with a helmet. The thing took for a time, and Conway
Dalrymple was picking up his gilt sugar-plums with considerable
rapidity.

On a certain day he and John Eames were to dine out together at a
certain house in that Bayswater district. It was a large mansion,
if not made of stone yet looking very stony, with thirty windows at
least, all of them with cut-stone frames, requiring, let me say, at
least four thousand a year for its maintenance. And its owner, Dobbs
Broughton, a man very well known both in the City and over the grass
in Northamptonshire, was supposed to have a good deal more than four
thousand a year. Mrs. Dobbs Broughton, a very beautiful woman, who
certainly was not yet thirty-five, let her worst enemies say what
they might, had been painted by Conway Dalrymple as a Grace. There
were, of course, three Graces in the picture, but each Grace was Mrs
Dobbs Broughton repeated. We all know how Graces stand sometimes; two
Graces looking one way, and one the other. In this picture, Mrs. Dobbs
Broughton as centre Grace looked you full in the face. The same lady
looked away from you, displaying her left shoulder as one side Grace,
and displaying her right shoulder as the other Grace. For this pretty
toy Mr. Conway Dalrymple had picked up a gilt sugar-plum to the tune
of six hundred pounds, and had, moreover, won the heart both of Mr
and Mrs. Dobbs Broughton. "Upon my word, Johnny," Dalrymple had said
to his friend, "he's a deuced good fellow, has really a good glass of
claret,--which is getting rarer and rarer every day,--and will mount
you for a day, whenever you please, down at Market Harboro'. Come
and dine with them." Johnny Eames condescended, and did go and dine
with Mr. Dobbs Broughton. I wonder whether he remembered, when Conway
Dalrymple was talking of the rarity of good claret, how much beer
the young painter used to drink when they were out together in the
country, as they used to be occasionally, three years ago; and
how the painter had then been used to complain that bitter cost
threepence a glass, instea