view. His reputation was
not yet dead, and there was much curiosity about his circumstances.
But Fenwick, looking at the scanty crowd, considering the faces that
were there and the faces that were not there, knew very well that it
could be of no practical assistance to him. Not a picture sold; and
next day there were altogether seven people in the gallery, of
whom five were the relations of men to whom he had given gratuitous
teaching at one period or other of his career.

And never, alack, in the case of any artist of talent, was there a
worse 'press' than that which dealt with his pictures on the following
morning. The most venomous article of all was the work of a man whom
Fenwick had treated with conceit and rudeness in the days of his
success. The victim now avenged himself, with the same glee which a
literary club throws into the black-balling of some evil tongue--some
too harsh and too powerful critic of the moment. 'Scamped and empty
work,' in which 'ideas not worth stating' find an expression 'not
worth criticism.' Mannerisms grown to absurdity; faults of early
training writ dismally large; vulgarity of conception and carelessness
of execution--no stone that could hurt or sting was left unflung,
and the note of meditative pity in which the article came to an end,
marked the climax of a very neat revenge. After reading it, Fenwick
felt himself artistically dead and buried.

A great silence fell upon him. He spoke to no one in the gallery, and
he avoided his club. Early in the afternoon he went to Lincoln's Inn
Fields--only to hear from the lawyers that they had done all they
could with the new scent, and it was no use pursuing it further. He
heard what they had to say in silence, and after leaving their office
he visited a shop in the Strand. Just as the light was waning, about
seven o'clock on a May evening, he found himself again in his studio.
It was now absolutely bare, save for a few empty easels, a chair
or two, and some tattered portfolios. The two men representing the
execution were in the dining-room. He could hear the voices of a
charwoman and of the lad who had helped him to arrange the gallery,
talking in the kitchen.

Fenwick locked himself into the studio. On his way thither he had
recoiled, shivering, from the empty desolation of the house. In the
general disarray of the ticketed furniture and stripped walls, all
artistic charm had disappeared. And he said to himself, with a grim
twist of the