The change from anger to flattery was so sudden that Gouache was confounded and could not find words in which to answer what was said to him.  Montevarchi’s eyes had lost their expression of astonishment, and a bland smile played about the corners of his sour mouth, while he rubbed his bony hands slowly together, nodding his head at every comma of his elaborate speech.  Anastase saw, however, that there was not the slightest hope that his proposal would ever be entertained, and by his own sensations he knew that he had always expected this result.  He felt no disappointment, and it seemed to him that he was in the same position in which he had been before he had spoken.  On the other hand he was outraged by the words that had fallen from Montevarchi’s lips in the first moments of anger and astonishment.  A painter, a man with a profession, without a name!  Gouache was too human not to feel the sting of each truth as it was uttered.  He would have defined himself in very much the same way without the least false pride, but to hear his own estimate of himself, given by another person as the true one, was hard to bear.  A painter, yes—­he was proud of it.  A man with a profession, yes—­ was it not far nobler to earn money by good work than to inherit what others had stolen in former times?  A man without a name—­was not his own beginning to be famous, and was it not better to make the name Gouache glorious by his own efforts than to be called Orsini because one’s ancestors had been fierce and lawless as bears, or Sciarra because one’s progenitor had slapped the face of a pope?  Doubtless it was a finer thing to be great by one’s own efforts in the pursuit of a noble art than to inherit a greatness originally founded upon a superior rapacity, and a greater physical strength than had characterised the ordinary men of the period.  Nevertheless, Gouache knew with shame that at that moment he wished that his name could be changed to Frangipani, and the fabric of his independence, of which he had so long been proud, was shaken to its foundations as he realised that in spite of all fame, all glory, all genius, he could never be what the miserly, cowardly, lying old man before him was by birth—­a Roman prince.  The conclusion was at once inexpressibly humiliating and supremely ludicrous.  He felt himself laughable in his own eyes, and was conscious that a smile was on his face, which Montevarchi would not understand.  The old gentleman was still talking.

“I cannot tell you,” he was saying, “how much I regret my total inability to comply with a request which evidently proceeds from the best motives, I might almost say from the heart itself.  Alas! my dear friend, we are not all masters of our actions.  The cares of a household like mine require a foresight, an hourly attention, an unselfish devotion which we can only hope to obtain by constant—­”