“He’s in Meriden now, an hour’s ride from Springfield.”

“Yes?” said Frederick, “I assumed he was still in Springfield.  But no matter.  While I was in Berlin and Paris, I conferred with some scientists, friends of mine, before boarding the Roland at Southampton.  Everybody told me the Roland was one of the best vessels.  To my astonishment, I met the young lady who is now enjoying your hospitality.  She was going to the United States with her father.  We were fortunate.  We got into the life-boat perfectly quietly, before the panic broke out, but we had to leave the young lady’s father behind.  I forgot to say I had already become acquainted with Hahlstroem and his daughter in Berlin.  Thus, fate brought us together, and I consider myself responsible for Miss Hahlstroem, both as a physician and a human being.  She is an artistic wonder.  She is a dancer.”

Willy Snyders gave a witty account of the attack of Webster and Forster’s agent; and the conversation turned on art in general and on American art in particular.

“Millions of dollars annually,” said Bonifacius Ritter, “are spent upon all sorts of art objects, an enormous sum on paintings alone.  At the same time, there is a class of persons here of Puritanic descent to whom any kind of art is the abomination of the arch-enemy.  For instance, there is an association of pious pillars of society, an association of vandals, invested with certain civic rights, whose object is the abolition of filth and the maintenance of chastity.  To that end it recently broke into one of the famous clubs of the New York jeunesse doree and destroyed a number of irreplaceable art treasures, masterpieces, among them even a Venus by Titian.”

“And the relation of the amateurs here,” said Lobkowitz, “to their artistic possessions is very funny.  You should see how they place their paintings.  The “Crucifixion” by Munkaczy is displayed in a department store in Philadelphia.  The Goulds have Rembrandts in their extremely comfortable bathrooms.  Of course, I have nothing to say against good pictures hanging in hotel halls and stairways.  The largest bar-room in New York has the whole Barbizon school—­Millets, Courbets, Bastien-Lepages, and Daubignys—­hanging over the bar.”

“My sole reason,” said Franck, “for going there every day for my whisky and soda.”

Ritter, Snyders and Lobkowitz burst out laughing.

Franck had the looks of a gypsy; so that two more un-European types, as Frederick said to himself, than he and Willy Snyders were scarcely conceivable.  Though a year older than Frederick, Franck, small-boned and youthfully slim, seemed to be seven or eight years younger.  He was forever shoving from his eyes a pitch-black lock, which promptly fell over his forehead again to the top of his nose.  He drank heavily and kept smiling.  He smiled, while the others laughed as he expounded the relation of art to whisky.