“What is your name?” says Mrs. Fisher, with comparative graciousness, considering that she is a bourgeois Englishwoman taken by surprise, and fearing both to be cold to a possible man of position and to be friendly with a possible nobody.     

       A name I must have, and I must also invent it at once, and it must be something both Scotch and Italian. I take the first two that come into my head.     

       “Dugald Cellarini,” I reply.     

       They look at one another dubiously. I must put them at their ease at any cost.     

       “A fine picture,” I say, indicating the portrait of my host, “and an excellent likeness. Do you not think so, Mrs. Fisher?”      

       She looks at me as if she had a new thought.     

       “Are you a friend of the artist?” she asks.     

       “An intimate,” I reply with alacrity.     

       “We have informed Mr. Benzine that we specially desired him not to bring any more of his Bohemian acquaintances to our house,” says the amiable lady.     

       I am plunging deeper into the morass! Still, I have at last accounted for my presence.     

       “Mr. Benzine did not warn me of this, madame,” I reply, coldly. “I apologize and I withdraw.”      

       I make a step towards the door, but the large form of Fisher still intervenes.     

       “Then Benzine sent you?” he says.     

       “He did, though evidently under a misapprehension.”      

       “And what about Smith?” asks Fisher, with an approach to intelligence in his bovine eye.     

       “Well, what about him?” I ask, defiantly.     

       “Did he send you, too?”      

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