Mr. Mungold paused, breathless with the rehearsal of his wrongs, and Stanwell said with a smile:  “You know poor Caspar is terribly stiff on the purity of the artist’s aim.”

“The artist’s aim?” Mr. Mungold stared.  “What is the artist’s aim but to please—­isn’t that the purpose of all true art?  But his theories are so extravagant.  I really don’t know what I shall say to Mrs. Millington—­she is not used to being refused.  I suppose I had better put it on the ground of ill-health.”  The artist glanced at his handsome repeater.  “Dear me, I promised to be at Mrs. Van Orley’s before twelve o’clock.  We are to settle about the curtain before luncheon.  My dear fellow, it has been a privilege to see your work.  By the way, you have never done any modelling, I suppose?  You’re so extraordinarily versatile—­I didn’t know whether you might care to undertake the Cupids yourself.”

Stanwell had to wait a long time for the doctor; and when the latter came out he looked grave.  Worse?  No, he couldn’t say that Caspar was worse—­but then he wasn’t any better.  There was nothing mortal the matter, but the question was how long he could hold out.  It was the kind of case where there is no use in drugs—­he had just scribbled a prescription to quiet Miss Arran.

“It’s the cold, I suppose,” Stanwell groaned.  “He ought to be shipped off to Florida.”

The doctor made a negative gesture.  “Florida be hanged!  What he wants is to sell his group.  That would set him up quicker than sitting on the equator.”

“Sell his group?” Stanwell echoed.  “But he’s so indifferent to recognition—­he believes in himself so thoroughly.  I thought at first he would be hard hit when the Exhibition Committee refused it, but he seems to regard that as another proof of its superiority.”

His visitor turned on him the penetrating eye of the confessor.  “Indifferent to recognition?  He’s eating his heart out for it.  Can’t you see that all that talk is just so much whistling to keep his courage up?  The name of his disease is failure—­and I can’t write the prescription that will cure that complaint.  But if somebody would come along and take a fancy to those two naked parties who are breaking each other’s heads, we’d have Mr. Caspar putting on a pound a day.”

The truth of this diagnosis became suddenly vivid to Stanwell.  How dull of him not to have seen before that it was not cold or privation which was killing Caspar—­not anxiety for his sister’s future, nor the ache of watching her daily struggle—­but simply the cankering thought that he might die before he had made himself known!  It was his vanity that was starving to death, and all Mungold’s hampers could not appease that hunger.  Stanwell was not shocked by the discovery—­he was only the more sorry for the little man, who was, after all, denied that solace of self-sufficiency which his talk so noisily pro- claimed.  His lot seemed hard enough when Stanwell had pictured him as buoyed