So he regarded me with something between scorn and uneasiness—­as a pachyderm might take a predatory bee.  For the sake of my steady production of the honey of free advertising he forgave a sting from which he was after all immune.  At the beginning of the dinner he had greeted me with what was meant for a civility and then had relapsed into silence.  To escape the loquacity of my other neighbour I gave myself to parallel observation of Vogelstein and Morrison—­the great dealer and his greater customer.

Both plainly belonged to the same species and it pleased my whim to symbolise them as a mastodon and a rogue elephant.  Morrison, the dreaded agent and operator, was unquestionably the finer creature.  He moved more precisely and with a sense of wieldy power.  His phrases cut where Vogelstein’s merely smote.  His bigness had something genial about it.  He looked the amateur, and indeed does not the rogue elephant trample down villages chiefly for the joy of the affray?  One felt that something more than Morrison’s preposterous winnings had been involved in the clashes of railroads and cataclysms on the exchange which had for years past been his major recreation.  Vogelstein, though evidently of coarser fibre, belonged to the same formidable breed.  The mastodon, we must suppose, lacked much of the finesse of the rogue elephant of later evolution.  And Vogelstein’s Semitism was of the archaic, potent, monumental type.  His abundant fat looked hard.  For all the sagging double chin, his jaw retained the character of a clamp.  Among the strong race of art dealers he was feared.  Whole collections not single objects were his quarry.  He paid lavishly, foolishly, counting as confidently on the ignorance and vanity of his clients, as ever Morrison upon the brute expansion of the national wealth.  But Vogelstein looked and was as completely the professional as Morrison the amateur.  There remained this essential difference that if nothing could be too big to stagger Vogelstein, nothing likewise could be too small to deter him.  I knew his shop, or rather his palace, and had observed the relish with which he could shame a timorous art student into giving three prices for a print.  It afforded him no more pleasure, one could surmise, to impose a false Rembrandt at six figures upon a wavering iron-master, or, indeed to unload an historic but rather worthless collection upon Morrison himself.  For Vogelstein was after all of primitive stamp, to wit the militant publican.  So he took toll and plenty, it mattered little where or whence.

To Morrison and Vogelstein no better foil could be imagined than Brush.  If they recalled the tusked monsters that charged in the van of Asiatic armies, his analogue was the desert horse.  Small, spare, sensitive, shy, his every posture suggested race, training, spirit, and docility.  His flair for classical art had become proverbial.  By mere touch he detected those remarkable counterfeits of Syracusan coins.  It was he who segregated the