for
their fate; the Master had a vanity, his wife had a loyalty, of which
success, depriving these things of innocence, would have diminished
the merit and the grace. Anyone could be charming under a charm,
and as he looked about him at a world of prosperity more void of
proportion even than the Master's museum he wondered if he knew
another pair that so completely escaped vulgarity.

'What a pity Lance isn't with us to rejoice!' Mrs Mallow on this
occasion sighed at supper.

'We'll drink to the health of the absent,' her husband replied,
filling his friend's glass and his own and giving a drop to their
companion; 'but we must hope he's preparing himself for a happiness
much less like this of ours this evening--excusable as I grant it to
be!--than like the comfort we have always (whatever has happened or
has not happened) been able to trust ourselves to enjoy. The comfort,'
the Master explained, leaning back in the pleasant lamplight and
firelight, holding up his glass and looking round at his marble
family, quartered more or less, a monstrous brood, in every room--'the
comfort of art in itself!'

Peter looked a little shyly at his wine. 'Well--I don't care what you
may call it when a fellow doesn't--but Lance must learn to _sell_, you
know. I drink to his acquisition of the secret of a base popularity!'

'Oh yes, _he_ must sell,' the boy's mother, who was still more,
however, this seemed to give out, the Master's wife, rather artlessly
allowed.

'Ah,' the sculptor after a moment confidently pronounced, 'Lance
_will_. Don't be afraid. He'll have learnt.'

'Which is exactly what Peter,' Mrs Mallow gaily returned--'why in the
world were you so perverse, Peter?--wouldn't, when he told him, hear
of.'

Peter, when this lady looked at him with accusatory affection--a grace
on her part not infrequent--could never find a word; but the Master,
who was always all amenity and tact, helped him out now as he had
often helped him before. 'That's his old idea, you know--on which
we've so often differed: his theory that the artist should be all
impulse and instinct. _I_ go in of course for a certain amount of
school. Not too much--but a due proportion. There's where his protest
came in,' he continued to explain to his wife, 'as against what
_might_, don't you see? be in question for Lance.'

'Ah well'--and Mrs Mallow turned the violet eyes across the table
at the subject of this discourse--'he's sure to have meant of course