of anything but
what he was saying."

The critic agreed. "The eyes are wonderful ... ruthless in their
power ... fires of hell." He laughed a deprecating apology for his
overemphatic metaphor and suggested: "It's possible that there was more to
the professorial life than met the eye. Had he a wife?"

"No; it was always a joke in the village that he would never look at a
woman."

The critic glanced up at the smoldering eyes of the portrait and smiled.
"I've heard of that kind of a man before," he said. "Never known to drink,
either, I suppose?"

"Cold-water teetotaler," laughed the professor, catching the spirit of the
occasion.

"Look at the color in that nose!" said the critic. "I fancy that the
ascetic moralist--"

A very young man, an undergraduate who had been introduced as the junior
usher, nodded his head. "Yep, a lot of us fellows always thought old Grid
a little too good to be true."

An older man with the flexible mouth of a politician now ventured a
contribution to a conversation no longer bafflingly esthetic: "His father,
old Governor Gridley, wasn't he ... Well, I guess you're right about the
son. No halos were handed down in _that_ family!"

The laugh which followed this speech was stopped by the approach of
Falleres, his commanding presence dwarfing the president beside him. He
was listening with a good-natured contempt to the apparently rather
anxious murmurs of the latter.

"Of course I know, Mr. Falleres, it is a great deal to ask, but she is so
insistent ... she won't go away and continues to make the most distressing
spectacle of herself ... and several people, since she has said so much
about it, are saying that the expression is not that of the late
professor. Much against my will I promised to speak to you--"

His mortified uneasiness was so great that the artist gave him a rescuing
hand. "Well, Mr. President, what can I do in the matter? The man is dead.
I cannot paint him over again, and if I could I would only do again as I
did this time, choose that aspect which my judgment told me would make the
best portrait. If his habitual vacant expression was not so interesting as
another not so permanent a habit of his face ... why, the poor artist must
be allowed some choice. I did not know I was to please his grandmother,
and not posterity."

"His aunt," corrected the president automatically.

The portrait-painter accepted the correction with his tolerant smile. "His
aunt," he repeated.