The critic glanced up at the smoldering eyes of the portrait and smiled.  “I’ve heard of that kind of a man before,” he said.  “Never known to drink, either, I suppose?”

“Cold-water teetotaler,” laughed the professor, catching the spirit of the occasion.

“Look at the color in that nose!” said the critic.  “I fancy that the ascetic moralist—­”

A very young man, an undergraduate who had been introduced as the junior usher, nodded his head.  “Yep, a lot of us fellows always thought old Grid a little too good to be true.”

An older man with the flexible mouth of a politician now ventured a contribution to a conversation no longer bafflingly esthetic:  “His father, old Governor Gridley, wasn’t he ...  Well, I guess you’re right about the son.  No halos were handed down in that family!”

The laugh which followed this speech was stopped by the approach of Falleres, his commanding presence dwarfing the president beside him.  He was listening with a good-natured contempt to the apparently rather anxious murmurs of the latter.

“Of course I know, Mr. Falleres, it is a great deal to ask, but she is so insistent ... she won’t go away and continues to make the most distressing spectacle of herself ... and several people, since she has said so much about it, are saying that the expression is not that of the late professor.  Much against my will I promised to speak to you—­”

His mortified uneasiness was so great that the artist gave him a rescuing hand.  “Well, Mr. President, what can I do in the matter?  The man is dead.  I cannot paint him over again, and if I could I would only do again as I did this time, choose that aspect which my judgment told me would make the best portrait.  If his habitual vacant expression was not so interesting as another not so permanent a habit of his face ... why, the poor artist must be allowed some choice.  I did not know I was to please his grandmother, and not posterity.”

“His aunt,” corrected the president automatically.

The portrait-painter accepted the correction with his tolerant smile.  “His aunt,” he repeated.  “The difference is considerable.  May I ask what it was you promised her?”

The president summoned his courage.  It was easy to gather from his infinitely reluctant insistence how painful and compelling had been the scene which forced him to action.  “She wants you to change it ... to make the expression of the—­”

For the first time the artist’s equanimity was shaken.  He took a step backward.  “Change it!” he said, and although his voice was low the casual chat all over the room stopped short as though a pistol had been fired.

“It’s not my idea!” The president confounded himself in self-exoneration.  “I merely promised, to pacify her, to ask you if you could not do some little thing that would—­”

The critic assumed the role of conciliator.  “My dear sir, I don’t believe you quite understand what you are asking.  It’s as though you asked a priest to make just a little change in the church service and leave out the ‘not’ in the Commandments.”