“But of course not....  How terrible all these great plaster figures are, and the busts, too!  They are so dreary, they have the air of being made for a cemetery.  Don’t they make you think of tombstones and mausoleums?”

Eve looked at her a little wonderingly.

“Are they very bad?  Do you know, I rather like them.  Not so much as the pictures, of course; but still I think some of them are charming, though I am rather glad Dick isn’t a sculptor.  Don’t you like that?  What is it—­Bacchus on a panther?”

“My dear, you are quite right,” said the old lady decisively, dropping her tortoise-shell lorgnon into her lap, and suppressing a yawn.  “Only, it is you who are charming!  I must go to the Grosvenor as soon as it opens to see if your clever husband, who seems to be able to paint everything and everybody, has done you justice....  But you mustn’t sit talking to an old grumbler like me any longer.  Go back to your picture; Mr. Dollond will pilot you.  And if you encounter Mary on the way, tell her that a certain discontented old lady of her acquaintance wants to be taken home.  Au revoir.”

About five minutes later Mary Masters found her aunt half asleep.  The paint had made her stupid, she said.  She could understand now why painters did not improve as they grew older; it was the smell of the paint.

“Ah,” she said, as they passed out into the busy whirl of Piccadilly, “how glad I shall be to get back to my Masons and Corots.  Though I like that pretty little Mrs. Lightmark....  Poor Philip!  Now tell me whom you saw.  Charles Sylvester, of course?  But no, I am too sleepy now; you shall tell me all about it after dinner.”

It was six o’clock before the Colonel was able to deposit his bulky, military person rather stiffly on a cushioned seat, and to remove his immaculate silk hat, with an expression of weary satisfaction.  He had devoted all the sunny spring afternoon, (when he might have been at Hurlingham, or playing whist at the “Rag"), to making his way, laboriously and apologetically, from room to room in search of friends and acquaintances, whom, when found, he would convoy strategically into the immediate vicinity of No. 37 in the First Room.

“My nephew’s picture,” he explained; “nice thing!  I don’t know much about painting” (he called it paintin’) “and art, and all that sort of thing, but I believe it’s about as good as they make them.”

He had accepted all the inconsistent, murmured criticism almost as a personal tribute; and for the greater part at least of the afternoon his beaming face had completely belied the discomfort occasioned by his severe frock-coat and tightly-fitting patent-leather boots; and his yearning for a comfortable chair, with a box of cigars and a whisky-and-seltzer at his elbow, had been suppressed, rigidly and heroically.

“I suppose it’s devilish good,” he thought, as he sat waiting for the rest of his party.  “People seem to admire those splashes of yellow and black, and all those dirty colours.  Personally, I think I prefer the girl in white next door.  Hullo, there’s Eve!”