dealer and his greater customer.

Both plainly belonged to the same species and it pleased my whim to
symbolise them as a mastodon and a rogue elephant. Morrison, the dreaded
agent and operator, was unquestionably the finer creature. He moved more
precisely and with a sense of wieldy power. His phrases cut where
Vogelstein's merely smote. His bigness had something genial about it. He
looked the amateur, and indeed does not the rogue elephant trample down
villages chiefly for the joy of the affray? One felt that something more
than Morrison's preposterous winnings had been involved in the clashes of
railroads and cataclysms on the exchange which had for years past been
his major recreation. Vogelstein, though evidently of coarser fibre,
belonged to the same formidable breed. The mastodon, we must suppose,
lacked much of the finesse of the rogue elephant of later evolution. And
Vogelstein's Semitism was of the archaic, potent, monumental type. His
abundant fat looked hard. For all the sagging double chin, his jaw
retained the character of a clamp. Among the strong race of art dealers
he was feared. Whole collections not single objects were his quarry. He
paid lavishly, foolishly, counting as confidently on the ignorance and
vanity of his clients, as ever Morrison upon the brute expansion of the
national wealth. But Vogelstein looked and was as completely the
professional as Morrison the amateur. There remained this essential
difference that if nothing could be too big to stagger Vogelstein,
nothing likewise could be too small to deter him. I knew his shop, or
rather his palace, and had observed the relish with which he could shame
a timorous art student into giving three prices for a print. It afforded
him no more pleasure, one could surmise, to impose a false Rembrandt at
six figures upon a wavering iron-master, or, indeed to unload an historic
but rather worthless collection upon Morrison himself. For Vogelstein was
after all of primitive stamp, to wit the militant publican. So he took
toll and plenty, it mattered little where or whence.

To Morrison and Vogelstein no better foil could be imagined than Brush.
If they recalled the tusked monsters that charged in the van of Asiatic
armies, his analogue was the desert horse. Small, spare, sensitive, shy,
his every posture suggested race, training, spirit, and docility. His
_flair_ for classical art had become proverbial. By mere touch he
detected those remarkable counterf