Renaissance intaglios at Bloomsbury only the winter before he exposed the composite figurines at Berlin.  To him the Balaklava Coronal must have proclaimed its nullity as far as its red gold could be seen.  For that matter the coronal was a bye-word, and why not?  The same dealers who had landed the more famous Tiara in the Louvre had the selling of it.  The greater museums in Europe and America had refused it at a bargain.  On Fifth Avenue and the Rue Lafitte all the dealers were joking about the Balaklava Coronal.  The name of Sarafoff, its maker, had even become accepted slang.  For a season we “Sarafoffed” our intimates instead of hoaxing them.  And in the face of all this Vogelstein had sold the Coronal to Morrison under Brush’s very nose.  It seemed so wholly incredible that I began counting Vogelstein’s heavy respirations, to make sure I was really awake.

Then the pale, tense mask of Brush—­so isolated in the apoplectic row across the table—­calmed me.  That he was Vogelstein’s or anyone’s tool was unthinkable.  Mercenary suspicions, to be sure, had been put about, but those who knew him merely laughed at such a notion.  Vogelstein also laughed, shaking volcanically within, whenever the Coronal, the genuineness of which he still maintained, was mentioned.  And he always treated Brush with a curious and almost tender condescension, much in fact as the mastodon might have regarded that fragile ancestor of the horse, the five-toed protohippos.

I have neglected to explain that the occasion which brought me at one table with such major celebrities as Morrison, Vogelstein, and Brush was a public dinner in behalf of civic art.  For just as we find the celestial compromised by the naughty Aphrodite, so we distinguish two antithetical sorts of art.  There is a bad private art which is produced for dealers and millionaires and takes care of itself, and there is a virtuous public art which we hope to have some day and meanwhile has to be taken care of by special societies.  It was one of these that was now dining for the good of the cause.  Under the benevolent eye of Morrison, our acting president, we had put pompano upon a soup underlaid with oysters, and then a larded fillet upon some casual tidbit of terrapins.  Whereupon a frozen punch.  Thus courage was gained, the consecrated sequence of sherry, hock, claret and champagne being absolved, for the proper discussion of woodcock in the red with a famous old burgundy—­Morrison’s personal compliment to the apostolate of civic art.

At the dessert, Morrison himself spoke a few words.  The little speech came brusquely from him, and no one who knew his rapacity for the beautiful could doubt his faith in the universal superlatives he now advocated.  Our art, he held, must weigh with our mills and railroads, else our life is out of balance.  We never grudged millions to burrow beneath New York for light, or for drink or speed, why then should we grudge them for the beautiful inutilities that might