While Mr. Wentworth meditated upon this anomaly his nephew was admiring him unrestrictedly.  He thought him a most delicate, generous, high-toned old gentleman, with a very handsome head, of the ascetic type, which he promised himself the profit of sketching.  Felix was far from having made a secret of the fact that he wielded the paint-brush, and it was not his own fault if it failed to be generally understood that he was prepared to execute the most striking likenesses on the most reasonable terms.  “He is an artist—­my cousin is an artist,” said Gertrude; and she offered this information to every one who would receive it.  She offered it to herself, as it were, by way of admonition and reminder; she repeated to herself at odd moments, in lonely places, that Felix was invested with this sacred character.  Gertrude had never seen an artist before; she had only read about such people.  They seemed to her a romantic and mysterious class, whose life was made up of those agreeable accidents that never happened to other persons.  And it merely quickened her meditations on this point that Felix should declare, as he repeatedly did, that he was really not an artist.  “I have never gone into the thing seriously,” he said.  “I have never studied; I have had no training.  I do a little of everything, and nothing well.  I am only an amateur.”

It pleased Gertrude even more to think that he was an amateur than to think that he was an artist; the former word, to her fancy, had an even subtler connotation.  She knew, however, that it was a word to use more soberly.  Mr. Wentworth used it freely; for though he had not been exactly familiar with it, he found it convenient as a help toward classifying Felix, who, as a young man extremely clever and active and apparently respectable and yet not engaged in any recognized business, was an importunate anomaly.  Of course the Baroness and her brother—­she was always spoken of first—­were a welcome topic of conversation between Mr. Wentworth and his daughters and their occasional visitors.

“And the young man, your nephew, what is his profession?” asked an old gentleman—­Mr. Broderip, of Salem—­who had been Mr. Wentworth’s classmate at Harvard College in the year 1809, and who came into his office in Devonshire Street. (Mr. Wentworth, in his later years, used to go but three times a week to his office, where he had a large amount of highly confidential trust-business to transact.)

“Well, he ’s an amateur,” said Felix’s uncle, with folded hands, and with a certain satisfaction in being able to say it.  And Mr. Broderip had gone back to Salem with a feeling that this was probably a “European” expression for a broker or a grain exporter.

“I should like to do your head, sir,” said Felix to his uncle one evening, before them all—­Mr. Brand and Robert Acton being also present.  “I think I should make a very fine thing of it.  It ’s an interesting head; it ’s very mediaeval.”