ything on earth I wouldn't have given to have Stroud alive
before me, and to hear him say: 'It's not too late--I'll show you how'?

"It WAS too late--it would have been, even if he'd been alive. I packed
up my traps, and went down and told Mrs. Stroud. Of course I didn't
tell her THAT--it would have been Greek to her. I simply said I couldn't
paint him, that I was too moved. She rather liked the idea--she's so
romantic! It was that that made her give me the donkey. But she was
terribly upset at not getting the portrait--she did so want him 'done'
by some one showy! At first I was afraid she wouldn't let me off--and at
my wits' end I suggested Grindle. Yes, it was I who started Grindle: I
told Mrs. Stroud he was the 'coming' man, and she told somebody else,
and so it got to be true.... And he painted Stroud without wincing; and
she hung the picture among her husband's things...."

He flung himself down in the arm-chair near mine, laid back his head,
and clasping his arms beneath it, looked up at the picture above the
chimney-piece.

"I like to fancy that Stroud himself would have given it to me, if he'd
been able to say what he thought that day."

And, in answer to a question I put half-mechanically--"Begin again?"
he flashed out. "When the one thing that brings me anywhere near him is
that I knew enough to leave off?"

He stood up and laid his hand on my shoulder with a laugh. "Only the
irony of it is that I AM still painting--since Grindle's doing it
for me! The Strouds stand alone, and happen once--but there's no
exterminating our kind of art."

The End of The Verdict

THE RECKONING

August, 1902

I

"The marriage law of the new dispensation will be: THOU SHALT NOT BE
UNFAITHFUL--TO THYSELF."

A discreet murmur of approval filled the studio, and through the haze of
cigarette smoke Mrs. Clement Westall, as her husband descended from his
improvised platform, saw him merged in a congratulatory group of ladies.
Westall's informal talks on "The New Ethics" had drawn about him an
eager following of the mentally unemployed--those who, as he had once
phrased it, liked to have their brain-food cut up for them. The talks
had begun by accident. Westall's ideas were known to be "advanced," but
hitherto their advance had not been in the direction of publicity. He
had been, in his wife's opinion, almost pusillanimously careful not
to let his personal views endanger his professional standing. Of late,