ting that his audience would be larger later on, he restrained
himself.

"What is art?" he slowly repeated, half-closing his eyes and smiling
mystically on his guests. "What is art?" Miss Long hung breathlessly on
his words.

As, however, he seemed more interested in the question than apt to reply
to it, Wilkinson moved on toward Miss Heatherton and the tea table, while
his place was taken by Miss Maitland and her mother, who had just come
into the room.

The studio was presently quite full, and conversation rose to a shriller
pitch. The talk was mostly of art. Catch phrases indicative of
informality and intimacy with the manufacture of the beautiful were
recklessly flung about. The pace quickened. The operations of Miss
Heatherton and Miss Long threatened speedily to be terminated because of
exhausted resources as well as insufficient space. It was warmer, and
there was a queer mixed odor of tea, roses, and paint. John M. Hurd,
greatly relieved after he discovered that he was not immediately expected
to buy anything, was recounting with animation to a fat man in a frock
coat how the basis of the family fortune had been laid by Mr. Hurd's
grandfather whose one life rule was never to invest his money in anything
west of Albany, New York. One of Pelgram's colleagues had pinned Miss
Maitland into a corner and was raptly telling her how great an influence
a certain old master of whom she had never heard had exerted on the work
of an extraordinarily talented young man from Fall River whose name and
pictures alike were entirely unknown to her.

Pelgram went by with his arm familiarly passed through that of a
phlegmatic-looking young Chinaman whom he led up to Miss Maitland's
portrait. Ling Hop had been cook on a yacht, when an artistic friend of
Pelgram's and a parasite of the yacht's owner had discovered one day that
the guardian of the galley was a fair draughtsman with some little
imagination; and much to his own surprise the Oriental had been snatched
from the cook stove and thrust into the artistic arena. It was lucky for
him that his scene was set in Boston, which is always sympathetically on
edge to embrace exotic genius. In a society delicately attuned to
intellectual harmonies from all sources, however strange or weird, the
success of a Chinaman possessing the slightest facility with the brush
was assured from the first. His industrious compatriots in the local
laundries, themselves more impassionate