“The English are awful funny about pictures,” he said.  “So are the French, so are my people.  They’re all awful funny.”

“I don’t understand you,” said Soames stiffly.

“It’s like hats,” said Monsieur Profond enigmatically, “small or large, turnin’ up or down—­just the fashion.  Awful funny.”  And, smiling, he drifted out of the gallery again, blue and solid like the smoke of his excellent cigar.

Soames had taken the cheque, feeling as if the intrinsic value of ownership had been called in question.  ‘He’s a cosmopolitan,’ he thought, watching Profond emerge from under the verandah with Annette, and saunter down the lawn toward the river.  What his wife saw in the fellow he didn’t know, unless it was that he could speak her language; and there passed in Soames what Monsieur Profond would have called a “small doubt” whether Annette was not too handsome to be walking with any one so “cosmopolitan.”  Even at that distance he could see the blue fumes from Profond’s cigar wreath out in the quiet sunlight; and his grey buckskin shoes, and his grey hat—­the fellow was a dandy!  And he could see the quick turn of his wife’s head, so very straight on her desirable neck and shoulders.  That turn of her neck always seemed to him a little too showy, and in the “Queen of all I survey” manner—­not quite distinguished.  He watched them walk along the path at the bottom of the garden.  A young man in flannels joined them down there—­a Sunday caller no doubt, from up the river.  He went back to his Goya.  He was still staring at that replica of Fleur, and worrying over Winifred’s news, when his wife’s voice said: 

“Mr. Michael Mont, Soames.  You invited him to see your pictures.”

There was the cheerful young man of the Gallery off Cork Street!

“Turned up, you see, sir; I live only four miles from Pangbourne.  Jolly day, isn’t it?”

Confronted with the results of his expansiveness, Soames scrutinized his visitor.  The young man’s mouth was excessively large and curly—­he seemed always grinning.  Why didn’t he grow the rest of those idiotic little moustaches, which made him look like a music-hall buffoon?  What on earth were young men about, deliberately lowering their class with these tooth-brushes, or little slug whiskers?  Ugh!  Affected young idiots!  In other respects he was presentable, and his flannels very clean.

“Happy to see you!” he said.

The young man, who had been turning his head from side to side, became transfixed.  “I say!” he said, “‘some’ picture!”

Soames saw, with mixed sensations, that he had addressed the remark to the Goya copy.

“Yes,” he said dryly, “that’s not a Goya.  It’s a copy.  I had it painted because it reminded me of my daughter.”

“By Jove!  I thought I knew the face, sir.  Is she here?”

The frankness of his interest almost disarmed Soames.

“She’ll be in after tea,” he said.  “Shall we go round the pictures?”