The Quartier came, squinted through the fingers, and praised and dispraised, after its wont.  The Symbolists sneered and told Peter to his teeth he was a Philistine; they said you can’t boot-lick Nature:  you’ve got to bully her, demand her soul, make her give you her Sign!  Quieter men came and studied Emma Campbell and her cat, and clapped Peter on the back; the more exuberant Latins kissed him, noisy, hearty, hairy kisses on both cheeks.  Undoubtedly, it would be accepted, they said!

It was, and hung conspicuously.  There were always small groups before it, for it created something like the uproar that Manet’s “Olympia” had raised in its time.  Peter learned from one critic that his technique was magnificent, his picture a masterpiece of psychology and of portraiture, and that if he kept on he’d soon be one of the Immortals.  He learned from another that while he undoubtedly had technique, his posing was commonplace, his subject banal, his imagination hopelessly bourgeois; that he was a painter of the ugly and the ordinary, without inspiration or imagination; that the one pretty and delicate note in the whole canvas was the butterfly in the lower left-hand corner, and that that was obviously reminiscent of Whistler, who on a time had used a butterfly signature!  But on the whole the criticisms were highly favorable; it was admitted that a young painter of promise had arisen.

Peter Champneys went about his business, indifferent to praise or blame. He knew he was a way-faring man whose business it was to follow his own road, a road he had to hack out for himself; and somewhere on the horizon were the purple heights.

The unbounded delight, the disinterested pride of the Hemingways, couldn’t have been greater had he been their son.  Mrs. Hemingway gave a brilliant entertainment in his honor, and he was feted and made much of.  Young ladies who danced divinely found his stork-like hopping pleasing, and his stammering French delightful.  This charming Monsieur Champneys, you see, was not only invested with the glamour of art; he was the heir of an American millionaire!  Ah, the dear young man!

The picture was sold to a Spanish nobleman, who said it reminded him of Velasquez’s “AEsop”; he was so delighted with the painter’s power that he commissioned Peter to portray his own long, pale, melancholy visage.  Whereupon the two Checkleighs and Stocks called loudly for a proper celebration, and Peter honored their clamorous demand.  It was a memorable affair, graced by the Quartier’s darlingest models, who had long since voted M’sieu Champnees a bon garcon.  A Spanish student, in a velvet coat and with long black hair, insisted upon charcoaling mustachios and imperial upon his host’s countenance, in honor of his countryman who had distinguished himself as a patron of art.  Later, a laughing girl whose blue-black hair was banded Madonna-wise around a head considerably otherwise, washed it off with a table napkin dipped in wine.  She sat on his knee to perform the operation, scanned his clean face with satisfaction, and taking him by the ears as by handles, kissed him gaily.  Then she went back to her own cher ami, who wasn’t in the least disturbed.