But it was Jose Querida who dominated the whole show, flooding everything with the splendour of his sunshine so that all else in the same room looked cold or tawdry or washed out.  His canvas, with its superbly vigorous drawing, at once became the sensation of the exhibition.  Sunday supplements reproduced it with a photograph of Querida looking amiably at a statuette of Venus which he held in his long, tapering fingers; magazines tried to print it in two colours, in three, in dozens, and made fireworks of it to Querida’s inwardly suppressed agony, and their own satisfaction.  Serious young men wrote “appreciations” about it; serious young women published instructive discourses concerning it in the daily papers.  Somebody in the valuable columns of the Tribune inquired whether Querida’s painting was meant to be symbolical; somebody in the Nation said yes; somebody in the Sun said no; somebody in something or other explained its psychological subtleties; somebody in something else screamed, “bosh!”

Meanwhile the discussion was a god-send to fashionable diners-out and to those cultivated leaders of society who prefer to talk through the Opera and philharmonic.

In what the educated daily press calls the “world of art” and the “realm of literature,” Querida’s picture was discussed intelligently and otherwise, but it was discussed—­from the squalid table d’hote, where unmanicured genius punctures the air with patois and punches holes in it with frenzied thumbs, to quiet, cultivated homes, where community of taste restricts the calling lists—­from the noisy studio, where pianos and girls make evenings lively, to the austere bare boards or the velvet elegance of studios where authority and preciousness, and occasionally attainment, reside, and sometimes do not.

    Cognatis maculis similis fera.

Neville was busy, but not too busy to go about in the evening among his own kind, and among other kinds, too.  This unexpected resurgance within him of the social instinct, he made no attempt to account for to others or to himself.  He had developed a mental and physical restlessness, which was not yet entirely nervous, but it had become sufficiently itching to stir him out of fatigue when the long day’s work had ended—­enough to drive him out of the studio—­at first merely to roam about at hazard through the livelier sections of the city.  But to the lonely, there is no lonelier place than a lively one; and the false brilliancy and gaiety drove him back upon himself and into his lair again, where for a while he remained meditating amid the sombre menace of looming canvases and the heavy futility of dull-gold hangings, and the mischievous malice of starlight splintering into a million incandescent rainbow rays through the sheet of glass above.

Out of this, after some days, he emerged, set in motion by his increasing restlessness.  And it shoved him in the direction of his kind once more—­and in the direction of other kinds.