's attorney was
present when it was read. He stated that he had been requested to ask
me to remain in charge of things for a week or two, until
arrangements for the removal could be made. It would also be
necessary to make an inventory of Vantine's collection, and the
assistant director of the museum was to get this under way at once.

I acquiesced in all these arrangements, but I was feeling decidedly
blue when I started back to the office. Vantine's collection had
always seemed to me somehow a part of himself; more especially a part
of the house in which it had been assembled. It would lose much of
its beauty and significance ticketed and arranged stiffly along the
walls of the museum, and the thought came to me that it would be a
splendid thing for New York if this old house and its contents could
be kept intact as an object lesson to the nervous and hurrying
younger generation of the easier and more finished manner of life of
the older one; something after the fashion that the beautiful old
Plantin-Moretus mansion at Antwerp is a rebuke to those present-day
publishers who reckon literature a commodity, along with soap and
cheese.

That, of course, it would be impossible to do; the last barrier to
the commercial invasion of the Avenue would be removed; that heroic
rear-guard of the old order of things would be destroyed; in a year
or two, a monster of steel and stone would rise on the spot where
three generations of Vantines had lived their lives; and the
collection, so unified and coherent, to which the last Vantine had
devoted his life, would be merged and lost in the vast collections of
the museum. It was a sad ending.

"Gentleman to see you, sir," said the office-boy, as I sat down at my
desk, and a moment later, M. Felix Armand was shown in to me.

I have only to close my eyes to call again before me that striking
personality, for Felix Armand was one of the most extraordinary men I
ever had the pleasure of meeting. Ruddy-faced, bright-eyed, with dark
full beard and waving hair almost jet black--hair that crinkled about
his ears in a way that I can describe by no other word than
fascinating--he gave the impression of tremendous strength and
virility. There was about him, too, an air of culture not to be
mistaken; the air of a man who had travelled much, seen much, and
mixed with many people, high and low; the air of a man at home
anywhere, in any society. It is impossible for me, by mere words, to
convey a