principles involved a mastery of the minutiae of the Venetian school I could only guess.  But one could imagine the process.  Seeking to ground his personal preferences in a general esthetic, he would have found his data absolutely untrustworthy.  How could he presume to interpret a Giorgione or a Titian when what they painted was undetermined?  Upon these shifting sands he declined to rear his tabernacle.  To the work of classifying the Venetians, accordingly, he set himself with dogged honesty.  As a matter of course Mantovani became his chief preceptor—­Mantovani who first discovered that the highly complex organism we call a work of art has a morphology as definite as that of a trilobite; that the artist may no more transcend his own forms than a crustacean may become a vertebrate.  For a matter of ten years Anitchkoff, espousing a fairly Franciscan poverty, gave himself to this ungrateful task.  How he contrived to live in the shadow of the great galleries was a mystery the solution of which one suspected to be bitter and heroic.  Gradually recognition as an expert came to him and with it an irksome success.  His fame had developed duties, and while his studies in esthetics remained fragmentary, he was persistently consulted on all manner of trivialities.  From Piedmont to the confine of Dalmatia he knew every little master that ever made or marred panel or plaster, and he paid the penalty of such knowledge.  Surmising the tragedy of his career and its essential nobility I had discounted the ugly rumours connecting him with the sale of the Del Puente Giorgione.  When every fool learned that the Giorgione at “The Curlews” was false, many inferred that Anitchkoff, having praised it, must have a hand in Brooks’s bad bargain—­a conclusion sedulously put about and finally hinted in cold type by certain rival critics.  Personally I knew that Brooks had bagged his find under quite other advice, but while I would always have sworn to Anitchkoff’s complete integrity in the whole Del Puente matter, my wonder also grew at so hideous a lapse of judgment.  I hopelessly fell back upon such banalities as the errability of mankind, being conscious all the time that some special and most curious infatuation must underlie this particular error.  Anitchkoff’s card interrupted some such train of thought.  He came in quietly as sunshine after fog.  His face between the curtains reminded me strangely of the awful moment in the Prestonville Museum—­paradoxically, for he was as genuine and reassuring as the Del Puente Giorgione had been baffling and false.

We began dinner with the stiffness of men between whom much is unsaid.  As the oystershells departed, however, we had found common memories.  He recalled delightfully those little northern towns in the debatable region which from a critic’s point of view may be considered Lombard or Venetian, with a tendency to be neither but rather a Transalpine Bavaria.  To me also the glow of the Burgundy on the tablecloth