“Oils,” decided Peter, examining the canvas.  “It will be rough work, remember.”  He made his preparations, turned upon his sitter the painter’s knife-like stare, and plunged into work.  It was swift work, and perhaps roughly done, as he had said, but by the miracle of genius he managed to catch and fix upon his canvas the tenacious and indomitable soul of the Englishman.  You saw it looking out at you from the steady, light blue eyes in the plain face with its craggy nose and obstinate chin; and you saw the kindness and delicacy of the firm mouth.  There he stood, flat-footed, easy in his well-worn clothes, one hand in his pocket, the other holding the blackthorn walking-stick he always carried, and looked at you with the quiet sureness of integrity and of power.  Peter added a few last touches; and then, instead of signing his name, he painted in a small Red Admiral, this with such exquisite fidelity that you might think that gay small rover had for a moment alighted upon the canvas and would in another moment fly away again.

His lordship studied his painted semblance critically.

“I rather thought you could do it,” he said quietly.  “I usually manage, as you Americans say, to pick a winner.  You’ll be a great painter if you really want to be one, Mr. Champneys.  Should you say sixty guineas would be a fair price for this?”

“That’s something like three hundred dollars, isn’t it?” asked Peter, interestedly.  “Suppose we call this a preliminary sketch for a portrait I’m to paint later—­say when I’ve had a few years of training.”

“You will charge me very much more than sixty guineas for a portrait, two or three years from now,” said the other, smiling.  He looked at the swiftly done, vivid bit of work. “This is what I want for my grandson; it is his grandfather as nature made him.  It is as true and as homely as life itself.”  And he looked at Peter respectfully, so that that young man blushed to his ears.  And that is how and when Peter Champneys painted his first ordered picture, signed with the Red Admiral; and how he won the faithful friendship of a crusty Englishman.  It was a very real friendship.  His lordship had what he himself called a country heart, and as Peter Champneys had the same sort, and neither man outraged the other by too much talk, they got along astonishingly well.

“He’s deucedly intelligent,” his lordship explained, with quiet enthusiasm.  “We’ll tramp for miles, and I give you my word that for an hour on end he won’t say three words!”

Hemingway, to whom this confidence was given, chuckled.  It amused him to watch his wife’s wild goose putting on native swan feathers.  Yet it pleased him, for he knew the boy appealed to her romantic as well as to her maternal instinct.  She handled him skilfully, and it was she who passed upon his invitations.  She wished him to meet clever and brilliant men and women; and at times she left him in the hands of young girls, pink-and-white visions who troubled as well as interested him.  He felt that he was really meeting them under false pretenses.  Their youth called to his, but he might not answer.  Between him and youth stood that unloved and unlovely girl in America.