the husband will never broach to the wife, out of respect for his respect for her.  Priam scarcely guessed that Alice imagined him to be on the way to lunacy.  He thought she merely thought him queer, as artists are queer to non-artists.  And he was accustomed to that; Henry Leek had always thought him queer.  As for Alice’s incredulous attitude towards the revelation of his identity, he did not mentally accuse her of treating him as either a liar or a madman.  On reflection he persuaded himself that she regarded the story as a bad joke, as one of his impulsive, capricious essays in the absurd.

Thus the march of evolution was apparently arrested in Werter Road during three whole days.  And then a singular event happened, and progress was resumed.  Priam had been out since early morning on the riverside, sketching, and had reached Barnes, from which town he returned over Barnes Common, and so by the Upper Richmond Road to High Street.  He was on the south side of Upper Richmond Road, whereas his tobacconist’s shop was on the north side, near the corner.  An unfamiliar peculiarity of the shop caused him to cross the street, for he was not in want of tobacco.  It was the look of the window that drew him.  He stopped on the refuge in the centre of the street.  There was no necessity to go further.  His picture of Putney Bridge was in the middle of the window.  He stared at it fixedly.  He believed his eyes, for his eyes were the finest part of him and never deceived him; but perhaps if he had been a person with ordinary eyes he would scarce have been able to believe them.  The canvas was indubitably there present in the window.  It had been put in a cheap frame such as is used for chromographic advertisements of ships, soups, and tobacco.  He was almost sure that he had seen that same frame, within the shop, round a pictorial announcement of Taddy’s Snuff.  The tobacconist had probably removed the eighteenth-century aristocrat with his fingers to his nose, from the frame, and replaced him with Putney Bridge.  In any event the frame was about half-an-inch too long for the canvas, but the gap was scarcely observable.  On the frame was a large notice, ‘For sale.’  And around it were the cigars of two hemispheres, from Syak Whiffs at a penny each to precious Murias; and cigarettes of every allurement; and the multitudinous fragments of all advertised tobaccos; and meerschaums and briars, and patent pipes and diagrams of their secret machinery; and cigarette-and cigar-holders laid on plush; and pocket receptacles in aluminium and other precious metals.

Shining there, the picture had a most incongruous appearance.  He blushed as he stood on the refuge.  It seemed to him that the mere incongruity of the spectacle must inevitably attract crowds, gradually blocking the street, and that when some individual not absolutely a fool in art, had perceived the quality of the picture—­well, then the trouble of public curiosity and of journalistic inquisitiveness