“I only wish to know Mr. Falleres’s attitude,” said the president stiffly, a little nettled by the other’s note of condescension.  “I presume he will be willing to take the responsibility of it himself and explain to the professor’s aunt that I have done—­”

The artist had recovered from his lapse from Olympian to calm and now nodded, smiling:  “Dear me, yes, Mr. President, I’m used to irate relatives.”

The president hastened away and the knots of talkers in other parts of the room, who had been looking with expectant curiosity at the group before the portrait, resumed their loud-toned chatter.  When their attention was next drawn in the same direction, it was by a shaky old treble, breaking, quavering with weakness.  A small, shabby old woman, leaning on a crutch, stood looking up imploringly at the tall painter.

“My dear madam,” he broke in on her with a kindly impatience, “all that you say about Professor Gridley is much to his credit, but what has it to do with me?”

“You painted his portrait,” she said with a simplicity that was like stupidity.  “And I am his aunt.  You made a picture of a bad man.  I know he was a good man.”

“I painted what I saw,” sighed the artist wearily.  He looked furtively at his watch.

The old woman seemed dazed by the extremity of her emotion.  She looked about her silently, keeping her eyes averted from the portrait that stood so vividly like a living man beside her.  “I don’t know what to do!” she murmured with a little moan.  “I can’t bear it to have it stay here—­people forget so.  Everybody’ll think that Gridley looked like that!  And there isn’t anybody but me.  He never had anybody but me.”

The critic tried to clear the air by a roundly declaratory statement of principles.  “You’ll pardon my bluntness, madam; but you must remember that none but the members of Professor Gridley’s family are concerned in the exact details of his appearance.  Fifty years from now nobody will remember how he looked, one way or the other.  The world is only concerned with portraits as works of art.”

She followed his reasoning with a strained and docile attention and now spoke eagerly as though struck by an unexpected hope:  “If that’s all, why put his name to it?  Just hang it up, and call it anything.”

She shrank together timidly and her eyes reddened at the laughter which greeted this naive suggestion.

Falleres looked annoyed and called his defender off.  “Oh, never mind explaining me,” he said, snapping his watch shut.  “You’ll never get the rights of it through anybody’s head who hasn’t himself sweat blood over a composition only to be told that the other side of the sitter’s profile is usually considered the prettier.  After all, we have the last word, since the sitter dies and the portrait lives.”

The old woman started and looked at him attentively.

“Yes,” said the critic, laughing, “immortality’s not a bad balm for pin-pricks.”