interest Soames, and so, as I could not explain to him that my insistence was merely charitable, I became silent. Without turning my head, I had him well within my range of vision. I hoped I looked less vulgar than he in contrast with Soames. I was sure he was not an Englishman, but what WAS his nationality? Though his jet-black hair was en brosse, I did not think he was French. To Berthe, who waited on him, he spoke French fluently, but with a hardly native idiom and accent. I gathered that this was his first visit to the Vingtieme; but Berthe was off-hand in her manner to him: he had not made a good impression. His eyes were handsome, but—like the Vingtieme’s tables—too narrow and set too close together. His nose was predatory, and the points of his moustache, waxed up beyond his nostrils, gave a fixity to his smile. Decidedly, he was sinister. And my sense of discomfort in his presence was intensified by the scarlet waistcoat which tightly, and so unseasonably in June, sheathed his ample chest. This waistcoat wasn’t wrong merely because of the heat, either. It was somehow all wrong in itself. It wouldn’t have done on Christmas morning. It would have struck a jarring note at the first night of ‘Hernani.’ I was trying to account for its wrongness when Soames suddenly and strangely broke silence. ‘A hundred years hence!’ he murmured, as in a trance.     

       ‘We shall not be here!’ I briskly but fatuously added.     

       ‘We shall not be here. No,’ he droned, ‘but the Museum will still be just where it is. And the reading-room, just where it is. And people will be able to go and read there.’ He inhaled sharply, and a spasm as of actual pain contorted his features.     

       I wondered what train of thought poor Soames had been following. He did not enlighten me when he said, after a long pause, ‘You think I haven’t minded.’      

       ‘Minded what, Soames?’      

       ‘Neglect. Failure.’      

       ‘FAILURE?’ I said heartily. ‘Failure?’ I repeated vaguely. ‘Neglect—yes, perhaps; but that’s quite another matter. Of course you haven’t been—appreciated. But what then? Any artist who—who gives—’ What I wanted to say was, ‘Any artist who gives truly new and great things to the world has always to wait long for recognition’; but the flattery would not out: in the face of his misery, a misery 

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