He had talked his unwonted emotion quite out, and now looked at his brother with his usual matter-of-fact eye.  “Did you tell the station agent to hold the trunk?”

The other, who was the younger, looked a little abashed.  “Well, no; I found the train was so late I thought maybe we could ... you know there’s that business to-morrow ...!”

His senior relieved him of embarrassment.  “That’s a good idea.  Sure we can.  There’s nothing we could do if we stayed.  It’s just a notion of Aunt ’Melia’s, anyhow.  I agree with her that it don’t look so awfully like Uncle Grid, but, then, oil-portraits are never any good.  Give me a photograph!”

“It’s out of our line, anyhow,” agreed the younger, looking at his watch.

III

The president of Middletown College had been as much relieved as pleased by the success of the rather pretentious celebration he had planned.  His annoyance was correspondingly keen at the disturbing appearance, in the afternoon reception before the new portrait, of the late professor’s aunt, “an entirely insignificant old country woman,” he hastily assured M. Falleres after she had been half forced, half persuaded to retire, “whose criticisms were as negligible as her personality.”

The tall, Jove-like artist concealed a smile by stroking his great brown beard.  When it came to insignificant country people, he told himself, it was hard to draw lines in his present company.  He was wondering whether he might not escape by an earlier train.

To the president’s remark he answered that no portrait-painter escaped unreasonable relatives of his sitters.  “It is an axiom with our guild,” he went on, not, perhaps, averse to giving his provincial hosts a new sensation, “that the family is never satisfied, and also that the family has no rights.  A sitter is a subject only, like a slice of fish.  The only question is how it’s done.  What difference does it make a century from now, if the likeness is good?  It’s a work of art or it’s nothing.”  He announced this principle with a regal absence of explanation and turned away; but his thesis was taken up by another guest, a New York art-critic.

“By Jove, it’s inconceivable, the ignorance of art in America!” he told the little group before the portrait.  “You find everyone so incurably personal in his point of view ... always objecting to a masterpiece because the watch-chain isn’t the kind usually worn by the dear departed.”

Someone else chimed in.  “Yes, it’s incredible that anyone, even an old village granny, should be able to look at that canvas and not be struck speechless by its quality.”

The critic was in Middletown to report on the portrait and he now began marshaling his adjectives for that purpose.  “I never saw such use of pigment in my life ... it makes the Whistler ‘Carlyle’ look like burnt-out ashes ... the luminous richness of the blacks in the academic gown, the masterly generalization in the treatment of the hair, the placing of those great talons of hands on the canvas carrying out the vigorous lines of the composition, and the unforgettable felicity of those brutally red lips as the one ringing note of color.  As for life-likeness, what’s the old dame talking about!  I never saw such eyes!  Not a hint of meretricious emphasis on their luster and yet they fairly flame.”