rne's liking his
paintings so little. It was easy to console oneself remembering the poor
lady's ignorance of art. The truth might be that something was wrong
with the pictures, which suspicion had driven the artist to go and have
a dispassionate look at them in the frigid hour between twelve and one
of the night. If a person is on the way to becoming a morbid ass he
cannot find it out too soon.

Gerald's dogma was that the first duty of a picture is to be beautiful.
His critics did not give sufficient attention to that aspect of his
work, he privately thought; they were put off by what they mistakenly
called its queerness, its mere difference from the academic, the
conventional. This was bitter, because he had always so loved beautiful
lines, beautiful tints, had insisted that the very texture, of his
painting should have the beauty of fine-grained skin.

He was no conspicuous colorist, of course, he did not by temperament
revel in the glow of rich, bold, endlessly varied tints. It was a
limitation, which his work naturally reflected. This was marked in fact
by modesty and melancholy of color-scheme. But that did not interfere
with beauty, he maintained. He had been thrilled by the discovery in the
Siena gallery of an old master with the same predilections as he, an
antipathy apparently to the vivid, crying, self-assertive colors, which
he accordingly with admirable simplicity left out, and interpreted the
world all in blues and greens, grays and violets, whites of many degrees
and tones and meanings.

"They're so sad that it's cruel!" Mrs. Hawthorne had voiced the
instinctive objection of her earth-loving, life-praising disposition to
the view he took of people and things. But what was there to do about
it? When he looked at a sitter to render his personality sincerely, that
was the way he saw him. If he had been limited to rendering a human
being in the single aspect he wore while walking from the drawing-room
to the dinner-table with a lady on his arm and a rich meal in prospect,
he would have given up painting, it interested him so little. Most of
the portrait-painters in vogue did thus paint the surface and nothing
besides. Gerald had no envy of their large fees at the price of such
boredom as he would have suffered in their place.

He held a canvas to the light of his candle. It was an old one of
Amabel. She had not been sitting for him, he had made this sketch from a
distance while she worked on her side. It