fficiently distinguished company, for if he had
been humiliated (which he was not), he could not have consoled himself
with the reflection that such a fate was natural to an obscure,
struggling young artist. He could no longer think of himself as very
young, alas, and if his position was not so brilliant as it ought to be
he could no longer justify it by calling it a struggle. He was something
of a celebrity and he was apparently in a society of celebrities. This
idea added to the curiosity with which he looked up and down the long
table as he settled himself in his place.

It was a numerous party--five and twenty people; rather an odd occasion
to have proposed to him, as he thought. He would not be surrounded by
the quiet that ministers to good work; however, it had never interfered
with his work to see the spectacle of human life before him in the
intervals. And though he did not know it, it was never quiet at Stayes.
When he was working well he found himself in that happy state--the
happiest of all for an artist--in which things in general contribute to
the particular idea and fall in with it, help it on and justify it, so
that he feels for the hour as if nothing in the world can happen to him,
even if it come in the guise of disaster or suffering, that will not be
an enhancement of his subject. Moreover there was an exhilaration (he
had felt it before) in the rapid change of scene--the jump, in the dusk
of the afternoon, from foggy London and his familiar studio to a centre
of festivity in the middle of Hertfordshire and a drama half acted, a
drama of pretty women and noted men and wonderful orchids in silver
jars. He observed as a not unimportant fact that one of the pretty women
was beside him: a gentleman sat on his other hand. But he went into his
neighbours little as yet: he was busy looking out for Sir David, whom he
had never seen and about whom he naturally was curious.

Evidently, however, Sir David was not at dinner, a circumstance
sufficiently explained by the other circumstance which constituted our
friend's principal knowledge of him--his being ninety years of age.
Oliver Lyon had looked forward with great pleasure to the chance of
painting a nonagenarian, and though the old man's absence from table was
something of a disappointment (it was an opportunity the less to
observe him before going to work), it seemed a sign that he was rather a
sacred and perhaps therefore an impressive relic. Lyon looked at