ROGER FRY.  Oh, no; but I hear Gersaint has a very fine picture by the Maitresse of the Moulin Rouge.  Weale says it is School of Gheel (pronounced Kail).

WILL ROTHENSTEIN.  Kail Yard I should think; do look at these things.

ROGER FRY (vaguely).  Who are they by?  Oh, yes, Dubedat, of course.

[FRY and ROTHENSTEIN regard picture with disdain; it withers under their glance. Stage illusion by MASKELYNE and THEODORE COOK.  STEPNEY places a red star on it.

GERSAINT.  Well, Mr. Bowyer Nichols, I hope we shall have a good long notice in the Westminster Gazette.  Now if there is any drawing . . .

BOWYER NICHOLS (very stiffly).  No, there isn’t.  I don’t think the Exhibition sufficiently important; everything seems to me cribbed:  most of the pictures look like reproductions of John, Orpen or Neville Lytton.

GERSAINT.  Ah, no doubt, influenced by Neville Lytton.  That portrait of Mr. Cutler Walpole has a Neville Lytton feeling.  Neville Lytton in his earlier manner.

Enter SIR PATRICK CULLEN, SIR RALPH BLOOMFIELD BONNINGTON and SIR COLENSO RIDGEON.

SIR C. RIDGEON.  Ah, Sir Patrick, I have just heard that the pictures are for sale; now I am going to plunge a little.  I think they will rise in value; and by the way I want to ask your opinion as a scientific man.  If I treat four artists with virus obscaenum for three weeks, what will be the condition of the remaining artists in the fourth week?

SIR P. CULLEN.  Colenso, Colenso, you ought to have been a senior wrangler and then abolished.

SIR C. RIDGEON.  What a cynic you are.  All the same I’ve had great successes, though Dubedat was one of our failures.  A rather anaemic member of the New English Art Club come to me for treatment, and in less than a year he was an Associate of the Royal Academy; what do you say to that?

SIR P. CULLEN.  Out of Phagocyte, out of mind.

SIR R. B. B. My dear Sir Patrick, how prejudiced you are.  Take MacColl’s case:  a typical instance of morbus ferox ars nova anglicana:  under dear Colenso he became an official at the Tate.

SIR C. RIDGEON.  Then there’s Sir Charles Holroyd, you remember his high tempera?

SIR P. CULLEN.  There has been a relapse I hear from the catalogue.

SIR R. B. B. How grossly unfair; that is a false bulletin issued by the former nurse:  ‘the evil that men do lives after them.’

SIR P. CULLEN.  My dear B. B., this is not Dubedat’s funeral.  Do you think Bernard Shaw will like the new epilogue?

BERNARD SHAW.  He will; I’m shaw.

L. C. C. INSPECTOR.  Excuse me, is Mr. Vedrenne here?  Ah, yes!  There is Mr. Vedrenne.  Will you kindly answer some of my questions?  Is that door on the left a real door?  In case of fire I cannot allow property doors; the actors might be seized with stage fright, and they must have, as Sir B. B. would say, ‘their exits and their entrances.’