S a swell. I saw a Goya in Munich once that bowled me
middle stump. A most evil-looking old woman in the most gorgeous lace.
HE made no compromise with the public taste. That old boy was 'some'
explosive; he must have smashed up a lot of convention in his day.
Couldn't he just paint! He makes Velasquez stiff, don't you think?"

"I have no Velasquez," said Soames.

The young man stared. "No," he said; "only nations or profiteers can
afford him, I suppose. I say, why shouldn't all the bankrupt nations
sell their Velasquezes and Titians and other swells to the profiteers
by force, and then pass a law that any one who holds a picture by an
Old Master--see schedule--must hang it in a public gallery? There seems
something in that."

"Shall we go down to tea?" said Soames.

The young man's ears seemed to droop on his skull. 'He's not dense,'
thought Soames, following him off the premises.

Goya, with his satiric and surpassing precision, his original "line,"
and the daring of his light and shade, could have reproduced to
admiration the group assembled round Annette's tea-tray in the
ingle-nook below. He alone, perhaps, of painters would have done
justice to the sunlight filtering through a screen of creeper, to the
lovely pallor of brass, the old cut glasses, the thin slices of lemon
in pale amber tea; justice to Annette in her black lacey dress; there
was something of the fair Spaniard in her beauty, though it lacked the
spirituality of that rare type; to Winifred's grey-haired, corseted
solidity; to Soames, of a certain grey and flat-cheeked distinction; to
the vivacious Michael Mont, pointed in ear and eye; to Imogen, dark,
luscious of glance, growing a little stout; to Prosper Profond, with
his expression as who should say: "Well, Mr. Goya, what's the use of
paintin' this small party?" finally, to Jack Cardigan, with his shining
stare and tanned sanguinity betraying the moving principle: "I'm
English, and I live to be fit."

Curious, by the way, that Imogen, who as a girl had declared solemnly
one day at Timothy's that she would never marry a good man--they were
so dull--should have married Jack Cardigan, in whom health had so
destroyed all traces of original sin, that she might have retired to
rest with ten thousand other Englishmen without knowing the difference
from the one she had chosen to repose beside. "Oh!" she would say of
him, in her "amusing" way; "Jack keeps himself so fearfully fit; he's
never had a day