o tell you--because I've always suspected you of
loathing my work."

I made a deprecating gesture, which he negatived with a good-humoured
shrug.

"Oh, I didn't care a straw when I believed in myself--and now it's an
added tie between us!"

He laughed slightly, without bitterness, and pushed one of the deep
arm-chairs forward. "There: make yourself comfortable--and here are the
cigars you like."

He placed them at my elbow and continued to wander up and down the room,
stopping now and then beneath the picture.

"How it happened? I can tell you in five minutes--and it didn't take
much longer to happen.... I can remember now how surprised and pleased
I was when I got Mrs. Stroud's note. Of course, deep down, I had always
FELT there was no one like him--only I had gone with the stream, echoed
the usual platitudes about him, till I half got to think he was a
failure, one of the kind that are left behind. By Jove, and he WAS left
behind--because he had come to stay! The rest of us had to let ourselves
be swept along or go under, but he was high above the current--on
everlasting foundations, as you say.

"Well, I went off to the house in my most egregious mood--rather moved,
Lord forgive me, at the pathos of poor Stroud's career of failure being
crowned by the glory of my painting him! Of course I meant to do the
picture for nothing--I told Mrs. Stroud so when she began to stammer
something about her poverty. I remember getting off a prodigious phrase
about the honour being MINE--oh, I was princely, my dear Rickham! I was
posing to myself like one of my own sitters.

"Then I was taken up and left alone with him. I had sent all my traps in
advance, and I had only to set up the easel and get to work. He had been
dead only twenty-four hours, and he died suddenly, of heart disease,
so that there had been no preliminary work of destruction--his face
was clear and untouched. I had met him once or twice, years before, and
thought him insignificant and dingy. Now I saw that he was superb.

"I was glad at first, with a merely aesthetic satisfaction: glad to have
my hand on such a 'subject.' Then his strange life-likeness began
to affect me queerly--as I blocked the head in I felt as if he were
watching me do it. The sensation was followed by the thought: if he WERE
watching me, what would he say to my way of working? My strokes began to
go a little wild--I felt nervous and uncertain.

"Once, when I looked up, I seemed to se