as so little of one. One
never heard of his selling a painting. In the darkest corners of his
friends' rooms you sometimes discovered one of his queer things--a gift,
hung there as a compliment. One might, furthermore, grant that it did
not matter that a man should be agreeable in appearance. But Gerald was
not even agreeable in disposition; he did not try to make himself
agreeable. What did the Fosses see in him?

The music had worked through a mighty flourish to a banging final chord.
Hunt escorted his lady to a chair, took the fan from her hand to fan her
with,--himself a little, too,--and while talking let his dark eye stray
from her and go roving, as was the habit of his eye.

It plunged through an open door into the quietly lighted library, where
the consul and his distinguished guest and a few more of the older or
staider people had withdrawn from the tumult and were having smokes and
conversation. They were considering a marble fragment, passing it from
hand to hand.

Hunt knew that fragment, and at sight of it looked cynical. The consul,
who had discovered it immured in an ancient garden-wall, believed it to
have been carved by Orcagna.

Old Hart had it in his hand. What he said could hardly be heard at that
distance; he passed it to Gerald with a look that seemed to ask for
corroboration. Gerald held it long and gazed seriously, with that
conceit in his own judgment which made him sometimes dispute the
attributions in no less a gallery than the Uffizi--say that a Verocchio
was not a Verocchio, a Giorgione not a Giorgione.

Charlie strained to catch some syllable of what he said. Vainly. The
pianist was preluding. Bertie Bentivoglio came to ask the girl in pink
to dance with him. From the chair she left empty Charlie moved nearer to
the library door, of half a mind to join the group in there. But Gerald,
upon whom Leslie had impressed it that he must do his duty and let there
be no wall-flowers, when the prelude had developed into a waltz returned
the marble into Hart's hand and came to the door. Whereupon Charlie
changed his mind and after saying "Hello, Gerald!" turned again, and the
young men stood looking over the scene side by side, two figures
contrasting in reality nearly as much as they did in Charlie's mental
image of them for purposes of comparison.

Any Rosina who sold buttonhole bouquets at the theater door could have
seen that Charlie was handsome, with his pale brown smoothness and
regulari