“Now that,” said Mr. Oxford, “is in my humble opinion one of the finest Farlls in existence.  What do you think, Mr. Leek?”

Priam paused.  “I agree with you,” said he.

“Farll,” said Mr. Oxford, “is about the only modern painter that can stand the company that that picture has in this room, eh?”

Priam blushed.  “Yes,” he said.

There is a considerable difference, in various matters, between Putney and Volterra; but the picture of Volterra and the picture of Putney High Street were obviously, strikingly, incontestably, by the same hand; one could not but perceive the same brush-work, the same masses, the same manner of seeing and of grasping, in a word the same dazzling and austere translation of nature.  The resemblance jumped at one and shook one by the shoulders.  It could not have escaped even an auctioneer.  Yet Mr. Oxford did not refer to it.  He seemed quite blind to it.  All he said was, as they left the room, and Priam finished his rather monosyllabic praise—­

“Yes, that’s the little collection I’ve just got together, and I am very proud to have shown it to you.  Now I want you to come and lunch with me at my club.  Please do.  I should be desolated if you refused.”

Priam did not care a halfpenny about the desolation of Mr. Oxford; and he most sincerely objected to lunch at Mr. Oxford’s club.  But he said “Yes” because it was the easiest thing for his shyness to do, Mr. Oxford being a determined man.  Priam was afraid to go.  He was disturbed, alarmed, affrighted, by the mystery of Mr. Oxford’s silence.

They arrived at the club in the car.

The Club

Priam had never been in a club before.  The statement may astonish, may even meet with incredulity, but it is true.  He had left the land of clubs early in life.  As for the English clubs in European towns, he was familiar with their exteriors, and with the amiable babble of their supporters at tables d’hote, and his desire for further knowledge had not been so hot as to inconvenience him.  Hence he knew nothing of clubs.

Mr. Oxford’s club alarmed and intimidated him; it was so big and so black.  Externally it resembled a town-hall of some great industrial town.  As you stood on the pavement at the bottom of the flight of giant steps that led to the first pair of swinging doors, your head was certainly lower than the feet of a being who examined you sternly from the other side of the glass.  Your head was also far below the sills of the mighty windows of the ground-floor.  There were two storeys above the ground-floor, and above them a projecting eave of carven stone that threatened the uplifted eye like a menace.  The tenth part of a slate, the merest chip of a corner, falling from the lofty summit of that pile, would have slain elephants.  And all the facade was black, black with ages of carbonic deposit.  The notion that the building was a town-hall that had got itself