nter that ever lived,
or even of his time. He had, I am ready to believe, very grave
limitations. But he was a painter by himself, as all fine painters are.
He had his own vision. He was Unique. He was exclusively preoccupied
with the beauty and the romance of the authentic. The little picture
showed all this. It was a painting, unfinished, of a girl standing at a
door and evidently hesitating whether to open the door or not: a very
young girl, very thin, with long legs in black stockings, and short,
white, untidy frock; thin bare arms; the head thrown on one side, and
the hands raised, and one foot raised, in a wonderful childish
gesture--the gesture of an undecided fox-terrier. The face was an
infant's face, utterly innocent; and yet Simon Fuge had somehow caught
in that face a glimpse of all the future of the woman that the girl was
to be, he had displayed with exquisite insolence the essential
naughtiness of his vision of things. The thing was not much more than a
sketch; it was a happy accident, perhaps, in some day's work of Simon
Fuge's. But it was genius. When once you had yielded to it, there was
no other picture in the room. It killed everything else. But, wherever
it had found itself, nothing could have killed IT. Its success was
undeniable, indestructible. And it glowed sombrely there on the wall, a
few splashes of colour on a morsel of canvas, and it was Simon Fuge's
unconscious, proud challenge to the Five Towns. It WAS Simon Fuge, at
any rate all of Simon Fuge that was worth having, masterful,
imperishable. And not merely was it his challenge, it was his scorn,
his aristocratic disdain, his positive assurance that in the battle
between them he had annihilated the Five Towns. It hung there in the
very midst thereof, calmly and contemptuously waiting for the
acknowledgement of his victory.

'Which?' said Mr Brindley.

That one.'

'Yes, I fancy it is,' he negligently agreed. 'Yes, it is.'

'It's not signed,' I remarked.

'It ought to be,' said Mr Brindley; then laughed, 'Too late now!'

'How did it get here?'

'Don't know. Oh! I think Mr Perkins won it in a raffle at a bazaar, and
then hung it here. He did as he liked here, you know.'

I was just going to become vocal in its praise, when Mr Brindley said--

'That thing under it is a photograph of a drinking-cup for which one of
our pupils won a national scholarship last year!'

Mr Aked appeared in the distance.

'I fancy the old boy wants to be