Promptly at nine o’clock in the morning of every business day for fifteen years, Hannibal G. Pelgram, uncle of Stanwood Pelgram, had seated himself at his desk in the office of the Pelgram Plumbers’ Supply Company, and it was rarely that he left before his stenographer had begun to show signs of impatience and anxiety. But in the sixteenth year of his reign his liver, which up to that time had acted with the most commendable regularity, began to develop alarming eccentricities of behavior. Mr. Pelgram became gradually less certain in his attendance, and finally his struggle with the refractory liver ended in the victory of that inconspicuous but important organ, and he passed peacefully away at a German spa in the course of taking a cure which would very likely have killed him even had he been in perfectly normal health.

His will began by the customary direction to his executor to pay his just debts and funeral expenses exactly as though the executor was assumed to be a thoroughly unscrupulous person who, although not benefiting himself in the least by his dishonesty, would try in every possible way to evade settlement with all the dead man’s legitimate creditors, including the undertaker. Then he left a small bequest to a faithful cook and another to an endowed retreat for tuberculous Baptists which already had more money than it could hope ever to use. The residue, consisting principally of stock in the Plumbers’ Supply Company, went to Stanwood, with the earnest wish that his nephew enter and eventually assume the direction of the business with which the family name had been so long and so honorably identified.

Stanwood received the news with modified rapture. He was grateful for financial independence, but the idea of taking up the bathtub business struck him with dismay. So with prudent forethought he sought out Amory Carruth, a lawyer of his acquaintance; and to him explained his dilemma. It required some measure of specious ingenuity to explain his errand as he wished; but Mr. Carruth, being used to squirming legatees, understood and came to the point with a candor which made Pelgram wince. After first flippantly suggesting that the plumbing business would at least afford Pelgram the chance to indulge his taste in porcelains, he eased the artist’s mind by a phrase as soothing as it was noncommittal.

“You can follow your uncle’s will as regards the disposition of his property. That part is sane enough. Whether it was equally sagacious, equally sane, to try to plunge you into the plumbing business is not so clear. We are, therefore, clearly justified if we say that he knew how he wished to dispose of his estate, but his mental condition was such that his legatee felt justified in modifying in some degree certain of his requests.”

This apologetic theory was finally accepted. Dawes, the manager, whose surplus income had gone into the bank rather than into his liver, purchased the estate’s interest, and on the proceeds Stanwood had now for five years been conducting his elaborate studio on Copley Square.

The completion of Miss Maitland’s portrait was marked by one of the artist’s characteristic functions. By any person in the ordinary walks of life it would have been called a tea, but Pelgram preferred to denominate it a private view. Every time he completed a work that he considered of real importance relatively more often than modesty might have prescribed he celebrated the birth of the masterpiece by one of these oddly termed baptisms in tannin. Possibly they were entitled to be called views, as the opus bravely challenged the tea table in popularity, and occasionally won by superior powers of endurance over a necessarily limited supply of edibles, but certainly the privacy was questionable, as to each one of them Stanwood invited nearly every one who might be expected to come.

Fortunately not a large proportion of these actually turned up. Some came because they were under obligations to the artist, and some because he was under obligations to them; some from vague curiosity, and others from sheer ignorance. Those who appeared at such a one as this, where the portrait of a young girl was displayed, were roughly limited to a few easily identified classes. There was centrally the young girl herself, and then there were the members of her family, all radiant except the purchaser of the picture, who customarily showed traces of sobriety and skepticism. There were one or two prospective patrons lured to the trap; some ephemeral sycophants, volunteer or mercenary; a few idle fellow artists who enjoyed seeing a colleague make what they considered to be an exhibition of himself; some inevitable people who went everywhere they were asked, especially when there was a prospect of something to eat; and a few puzzled and lonely-looking souls who could furnish no explanation of their attendance, did not stay very long, and never came a second time.

At this view the rôle of sycophants was to be played by two young girls who had taken up self-cultivation as a sort of fad, and had somehow become obsessed with the curious idea that art such as was found in Pelgram’s studio could assist them in their commendable pursuit of culture. Their host was consequently delighted when, at an early hour, Miss Heatherton and Miss Long arrived, as they had promised to do. Their manifest adoration would produce an admirable spot light in which he might stand during the function, but more than that, he hoped that Helen herself would be impressed by the deep regard in which these fair disciples evidently held him and his work. Miss Heatherton was to pour the tea, and Miss Long was to distribute the thin lettuce sandwiches which formed its somewhat unsubstantial accompaniment.

Miss Heatherton’s initial remark demonstrated the fact that, despite her plunge into what her family considered a dangerous part of Bohemia, she had managed to preserve intact her adherence to the traditional in conversational matters. When Pelgram escorted her to the tea table, she bleated a pathetic protest against his positive inhumanity in placing her where the great work was invisible.

“Oh, Mr. Pelgram, you are really cruel! Eleanor, don’t you think he might have put me where I could sit and look at that beautiful portrait, and not down here at the other end of the room?”

Miss Long, a tall girl with large liquid eyes and a weak red mouth, languidly murmured a sympathetic assent, and their host smiled deprecatingly, but with an inward glow of satisfaction; such a remark was obviously not inspired by the exact truth, but it was nevertheless pleasant to hear.

“Ah, Miss Heatherton,” he replied, “perhaps after all it is better as I have ordered it. For its little hour the picture should reign with its sovereignty unquestioned, while if you were near by ” he broke off meaningly, and Miss Long rewarded his compliment with a bovine glance of rapture, while Miss Heatherton looked modestly down at the teapot. Even to an unaesthetic person the arrangement seemed very good indeed, but rather for the more practical reason that the proximity of food and drink would very likely have distracted the attention of some of the more hungry visitors to such a degree that the work of art might have been comparatively ignored.

The next to arrive were Isabel Hurd and Wilkinson. Wilkinson had not been invited, but on hearing his cousin say that she was starting for the studio, he promptly announced that he would accompany her. He knew that Pelgram disliked him intensely, but he did not feel the slightest hesitation on that account in accepting the artist’s hospitality, and in fact quite enjoyed the prospect of a dash into the enemy’s country. To be sure, he saw little chance of loot except a trifling modification of his chronic afternoon hunger; but Isabel’s society was desirable, and Pelgram appealed vividly to his sense of the ludicrous. His reception was all he could have hoped; his host greeted him with outward affability, but when he extended his hand from the black velvet cuff with the handkerchief tucked into it, his face expressed the hidden anguish of anticipated ridicule to such a degree that Wilkinson felt his visit already justified.

“It is very good of you to come,” said the artist, with a forced smile. “I had no idea you were interested in art.”

“Oh, but I am, though,” returned the other, confidently. “I have no idea what it is, but I’m very much interested in it. And every one says I have the artistic temperament in the highest degree. By the way, what is art, anyway? No one ever told me.”

Pelgram gave a preliminary cough, and glanced hastily about the room, but calculating that his audience would be larger later on, he restrained himself.

“What is art?” he slowly repeated, half-closing his eyes and smiling mystically on his guests. “What is art?” Miss Long hung breathlessly on his words.

As, however, he seemed more interested in the question than apt to reply to it, Wilkinson moved on toward Miss Heatherton and the tea table, while his place was taken by Miss Maitland and her mother, who had just come into the room.

The studio was presently quite full, and conversation rose to a shriller pitch. The talk was mostly of art. Catch phrases indicative of informality and intimacy with the manufacture of the beautiful were recklessly flung about. The pace quickened. The operations of Miss Heatherton and Miss Long threatened speedily to be terminated because of exhausted resources as well as insufficient space. It was warmer, and there was a queer mixed odor of tea, roses, and paint. John M. Hurd, greatly relieved after he discovered that he was not immediately expected to buy anything, was recounting with animation to a fat man in a frock coat how the basis of the family fortune had been laid by Mr. Hurd’s grandfather whose one life rule was never to invest his money in anything west of Albany, New York. One of Pelgram’s colleagues had pinned Miss Maitland into a corner and was raptly telling her how great an influence a certain old master of whom she had never heard had exerted on the work of an extraordinarily talented young man from Fall River whose name and pictures alike were entirely unknown to her.

Pelgram went by with his arm familiarly passed through that of a phlegmatic-looking young Chinaman whom he led up to Miss Maitland’s portrait. Ling Hop had been cook on a yacht, when an artistic friend of Pelgram’s and a parasite of the yacht’s owner had discovered one day that the guardian of the galley was a fair draughtsman with some little imagination; and much to his own surprise the Oriental had been snatched from the cook stove and thrust into the artistic arena. It was lucky for him that his scene was set in Boston, which is always sympathetically on edge to embrace exotic genius. In a society delicately attuned to intellectual harmonies from all sources, however strange or weird, the success of a Chinaman possessing the slightest facility with the brush was assured from the first. His industrious compatriots in the local laundries, themselves more impassionate critics, doubtless regarded Ling Hop as an impudent charlatan; but Boston in its most restricted and exclusive sense looked at his work with interest and respect, though sadly without humor. The guest stood silently before the portrait, scanning it earnestly, almost with anxiety, blinking his almond eyes behind his shell-rimmed glasses. As, however, he did not know enough about the technique of painting to offer a sensible appreciation, he wisely confined himself to a very few vaguely eulogistic monosyllables, which seemed greatly to gratify the artist.

“Ah,” said Ling Hop, “delicate delicate!” the adjective being pronounced with a haunting repetition of its most melodious letter. Years of more or less familiarity with the English language had not been able to efface his racial penchant for the labial. One might naturally suppose that to compress a native alphabet of some one hundred and twenty-six letters into one of twenty-six would result in much confusion and some inexplicable preferences, but no one has ever been able to point out why the functions of the extra hundred should have to be assumed by the letter “l” alone.

But to Pelgram the vague liquid sound fell dulcetly on the ear, and by Miss Long and Miss Heatherton no flaw in this art criticism could be discerned. And the artist, glancing about him, saw with gratification that, in addition to the two young ladies, there had by some vague current of motion been swept into his immediate vicinity human flotsam to the extent of perhaps half a dozen irresponsible souls, ignorant that their immediate fate was to be not guests, but auditors.

“Do you feel that? I strove for it,” he said in a clear, penetrating voice, calculated to attract the attention, if not the interest, of those even outside the charmed though widening circle. “I strove for just that, feeling that here, above all, it was the one desideratum. At times I feared ” he turned to the impassive Mongolian a puckered forehead “that I might be sacrificing somewhat of the virile. But no! I said surely I can sacrifice all things, all considerations, save one.”

“You were right,” said Ling Hop, cryptically, feeling that he was called upon to say something, but still with that faint adumbration of the inevitable letter.

“In these days of strange, wild gods, in whose temples the heathen riot in flames and flares and orgies of color, it seems to me incumbent upon the saner among the craft to cling perhaps closer than ever to the great canons that the great masters have set forth for us. What do these new men worship? Color color blobs and blotches of raw, crude color! They think of nothing else, these barbarians. Let drawing, arrangement, construction even, go they say and with bloodshot eyes they dance in one wild debauch of life and light! It is not art!”

Casting an imperceptibly alert eye to right and left, Pelgram saw that he was now in possession of the maximum audience he was likely to achieve. In a near-by corner, blockaded by three attentive gentlemen who seemed much less interested in art than in nature, sat Miss Maitland, within easy though obstructed earshot. She could hardly help hearing, and with an inward sigh of satisfaction the artist gave himself over utterly to the exordium which for some inexplicable reason formed the nucleus of his idea of a properly conducted studio affair. He felt that he was going to be very eloquent, and he felt reasonably secure from interruption, for no one in that company would have the temerity to question, on his own hearthstone, his pronunciamentos. No one, except perhaps the irrepressible Wilkinson, and it was with the greatest relief that he beheld Charlie safely out of hearing and engaged in rapt converse with Isabel.

“Yes, those of us who believe, who still hold the immortal things sacred, have a great trust vested in us. It is for us, the few still faithful, to keep the lustral fires pure from defilement by the unbelievers. What would the great draughtsmen of old, the great true colorists among the masters, say if we should betray them to the wild, criminal vagaries of these falsest of false prophets?”

He turned savagely upon Ling Hop, who replied, with entire truth, and with a certain feeling for caution which showed that he could be trusted in any crisis:

“Yes. What?”

“They swarm with muddy feet through the safest, surest halls of art of all time. They do not hesitate to say that arrangement arrangement! is not a necessity in a work of art. They say construction is not vital. They care nothing of whether nature at the moment is right or wrong whether there is a combination of circumstances worthy of reproduction but they throw their pictures on the canvas in any way they chance to come. And what pictures! Raw, flaunting things, with no care given to balance, none to line, none to color! It would be unbelievable if it were not true.”

Miss Heatherton, on whom his inspired gaze at this juncture rested, closed her eyes, as though she feared to disturb even by a glance the continuity of this astonishing harangue. At the footstool of Olympus sat Miss Long, in patient ecstasy.

“These painters anarchists of the craft, I call them would force us to leave off painting quiet interiors,” continued Pelgram, lowering his voice with mournful impressiveness, “because, forsooth, interiors are inane, undramatic things unless relieved by color! Not our color, but the bright, blazing color that roars and raves. Still-lifes they condemn unless they swim in seas of pure emotion. For with them color is emotion, emotion color. . . . To be sure, we know better, but I repeat that a heavy charge is on us. We must march loyally forward, keeping our banners high. We must go on painting a modest lady, dressed in dark blue, sitting on a gray chair with a shiny wooden floor beneath her to show that these things can sometimes make an artistic harmony worthy of being translated for all time into a picture that shall never die. What if this has been done ten thousand times before? The old gods are jealous gods, and at the ten thousandth time they take their own at last.”

“Yes. At last,” said Ling Hop, observing that a response was expected of him.

Pelgram turned to the portrait.

“And this! portrait painting! to which all the masters finally turn. What would they these colorists make out of portrait painting?”

Evidently his mind recoiled from the thought, for he turned aside with a gesture of resignation. And Miss Long and Miss Heatherton were never to know what horrid fate awaited portrait painting at their hands, for from the rim of the circle came the cheerful voice of Wilkinson:

“Money, old chap, money. That’s what they’d make out of portrait painting. And after all, that’s the only satisfactory standard of success, established for every school of art what will the picture bring? Now isn’t that so?”

Pelgram’s upper lip drew viciously back from his teeth; Wilkinson, pleasantly advancing, smiled with content; the flotsam had floated away as noiselessly as youth; and the artist, collecting his forces to reply, saw that, except for the two rapt sycophants at his elbow, he was alone. He laughed a short laugh.

“With many, no doubt it is,” he snapped.

His adversary continued his placid progress down the room until he reached the tea table, where immediately he could be heard inquiring whether the diminutive “arrangements in green and white” were intended for lettuce sandwiches.

Pelgram glanced quickly toward where Miss Maitland still sat, surrounded by her attentive friends. It seemed hardly likely that she could have missed Charlie’s distressing incursion into a monologue to which he had not been invited, but the girl seemed so wholly occupied that the painter took heart. His ruffled self-esteem preened itself anew, and he moved circuitously toward the object of his concern in as disinterested a manner as he could assume. At the sight of their host, the other members of Miss Maitland’s group took occasion inconspicuously to drift away, being moved either by hunger or by good nature or by fear lest the monologue recommence. All but one obtuse youth who neither stirred nor displayed any tendency so to do.

“Before you go I want to show you that full length of Mrs. Warburton,” the artist suggested pointedly to Helen. Her only attitude was affable resignation; she accepted the inevitable as gracefully as possible, and they strolled across the end of the studio to an alcove where a number of canvases stood coyly awaiting beholders. Several tall potted plants nearly hid the alcove from the studio at large, and Pelgram noted with satisfaction that the remaining guests were mostly grouped about Wilkinson at the other end. He turned, to gain time for thought, to the pile of frames in the corner, and presently pulled forth the portrait of which he had spoken.

“Not so interesting an arrangement as I made of you,” he commented.

“I might just as well have been a sandwich,” was the girl’s immediate thought, but she replied politely, “No.”

“I would certainly have been hopelessly lacking in talent of any sort if I had not been able to do something really fine from the chance you offered me,” he went on.

Feeling quite uncomfortable and not knowing exactly what to say to this, Helen said nothing. The artist, assuming that her silence implied her permission for him to continue, cleared his throat for what he felt should be a master effort.

“Miss Maitland,” he said, regarding her gravely, “it is naturally not for me to say, but I sincerely believe that your portrait is a work of real merit. And whatever slight ability I may possess has of course been freely spent on it. But there is something else to consider there is ability, but there is also the element of inspiration, and whatever I may have lacked in the one you have bountifully given me in the other. If others should think the portrait a success, I must thank not myself but you. And beyond the success of the picture itself, which at best can only be for a day, you have given me what no one ever gave me before you must know what that may be.”

“You are entirely welcome, I’m sure,” his visitor replied, in considerable embarrassment. It was not exactly what she meant to say, and the egotism of the artist immediately misconstrued it.

“Helen,” he said, “the painting of your portrait has been a perilous adventure for me. Up to the time I began it, I lived in a world alone, and I thought only of my art. My model was always a thing wholly subordinate; after the picture was completed I never cared whether I ever saw the subject again. But as you came here day after day, my art seemed of less importance, and you came forward more and more. And finally I have found that nothing matters nothing counts but you.”

Miss Maitland did not answer. She was conscious only of wondering whether she were going to be able to escape from that alcove before she had expressed to her host her actual opinion of him and all his works, and she rather feared her powers of repression would prove unequal to the occasion. And her opinion of him was at its nadir. With unerring maladroitness Pelgram had chosen the time of all others when his star was burning with its feeblest flame. She continued to sit passively, while the waves of the artist’s eloquence rolled over her.

“I will not ask you if you love me it is enough to tell you that I love you more than all the world. But can you not give me one single word of hope?”

He paused expectantly.

Helen hesitated. Still persisted the naughty longing to break forth and say her will, but she knew it would be wrong. After all, there had been in Pelgram’s plea as much genuine sincerity as there could be in anything of his, and she felt that her wish to be utterly candid was a childish and unworthy one.

“Mr. Pelgram,” she said at length, “if I should give you any hope, it would be unjust and unkind to you, for I feel that I could never care for you in the way you wish me to. I respect your ability, but that is not enough. Please do not speak of this again. You are an artist, and there ought to be for you enough in the world to keep you happy even without me.”

Pelgram grew a little pale. To him, who had such difficulty in being real, this was very real. And seeing it, the girl softened.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m really more sorry than I can tell you.”

And then she had cause for repentance, for the artist, with an effort, drew all his pride to aid him. And his proud mood was by no means his best. The only redeeming feature of the valedictory was that finally it was over.

Helen, looking a trifle jaded, walked homeward under the escort of Isabel and Wilkinson. She was quite silent, and Isabel, suspecting trouble, said little for her part.

Not so Charlie, who held forth fluently, with the exhilaration one feels on coming out of a hot church and dashing off in a touring car.

“Well,” he said, “certain unfriendly persons have studiously circulated the impression that I am eligible for the Paresis Club a chucklehead, in fact. But you will have to admit that I never give Private Views. You must concede that I do not inflict on my friends my opinions about crude color. Why, there must be several hundred things I don’t do!”

“Thank Heaven you don’t!” remarked Miss Maitland.