‘Where is it?’

‘In a house near here.  But father could get you in.’

He hesitated, then laughed, ungraciously.

’I don’t seem to have finished yet with the National Gallery.  Who—­please—­is the gentleman on your right?’

She smiled.

’Oh! don’t you know him?  You must let me introduce him.  It is Mr. Arthur Welby.  Doesn’t he talk well?’

She introduced them.  Welby received the introduction with a readiness—­a touch of eagerness indeed—­which seemed to show a mind favourably prepared for it.

’Lord Findon tells me you’re sending in a most awfully jolly thing to the Academy!’ he said, bending across Madame de Pastourelles, his musical voice full of cordiality.  Fenwick made a muttered reply.  It might have been thought he disliked being talked to about his own work.  Welby accordingly changed the subject at once; he returned to the picture he had been pressing on Lord Findon.

‘Haven’t you seen it?  You really should.’  But this elicited even less response.  Fenwick glared at him—­apparently tongue-tied.  Then Madame de Pastourelles and her neighbour talked to each other, endeavouring to draw in the stranger.  In vain.  They fell back, naturally, into the talk of intimates, implying a thousand common memories and experiences; and Fenwick found himself left alone.

His mind burned with annoyance and self-disgust.  Why did he let these people intimidate him?  Why was he so ridiculously self-conscious?—­so incapable of holding his own?  He knew all about Arthur Welby; his name and fame were in all the studios.  The author of the picture of the year—­in the opinion, at least, of the cultivated minority for whom rails and policemen were not the final arbiters of merit; glorified in the speeches at the Academy banquet; and already overwhelmed with more commissions than he could take—­Welby should have been one of the best hated of men.  On the contrary, his mere temperament had drawn the teeth of that wild beast, Success.  Well-born, rich, a social favourite, trained in Paris and Italy, an archaeologist and student as well as a painter, he commanded the world as he pleased.  Society asked him to dinners, and he gave himself no professional airs and went when he could.  But among his fellows he lived a happy comrade’s life, spending his gifts and his knowledge without reserve, always ready to help a man in a tight place, to praise a friend’s picture, to take up a friend’s quarrel.  He took his talent and his good-fortune so simply that the world must needs insist upon them, instead of contesting them.

As for his pictures, they were based on the Italian tradition—­rich, accurate, learned, full of literary allusion and reminiscence.  In Fenwick’s eyes, young as was their author, they were of the past rather than of the future.  He contemptuously thought of them as belonging to a dead genre.  But the man who painted them could draw.