Its technical excellence was considerable.  The artist had evidently intended to represent a woman piquant and fascinating, if not strictly beautiful.  Many persons said it was lovely.  Other critics said that, whether the artist intended it or not, he had revealed the real character of the subject.  There was something sinister in its beauty.  One artist, who was out of fashion as an idealist, said, of course privately, that the more he looked at it the more hideous it became to him—­like one of Blake’s objective portraits of a “soul”—­the naked soul of an evil woman showing through the mask of all her feminine fascinations—­the possible hell, so he put it, under a woman’s charm.

It was this in the portrait that Philip saw in the face smiling a welcome—­like an old, sweetly smiling Lalage—­from which had passed away youth and the sustaining consciousness of wealth and of a place in the great world.  The smile was no longer sweet, though the words from the lips were honeyed.

“It is very good of you to drop in in this way, Mr. Burnett,” she said, as she gave him her hand.  “It is very quiet down here.”

“It is to me the pleasantest part of the city.”

“You think so now.  I thought so once,” and there was a note of sadness in her voice.  “But it isn’t New York.  It is a place for the people who are left.”

“But it has associations.”

“Yes, I know.  We pretend that it is more aristocratic.  That means the rents are lower.  It is a place for youth to begin and for age to end.  We seem to go round in a circle.  Mr. Mavick began in the service of the government, now he has entered it again—­ah, you did not know?—­a place in the Custom-House.  He says it is easier to collect other people’s revenues than your own.  Do you know, Mr. Burnett, I do not see much use in collecting revenues anyway—­so far as New York is concerned the people get little good of them.  Look out there at that cloud of dust in the street.”

Mrs. Mavick rambled on in the whimsical, cynical fashion of old ladies when they cease to have any active responsibility in life and become spectators of it.  Their remaining enjoyment is the indulgence of frank speech.

“But I thought,” Philip interrupted, “that this part of the town was specially New York.”

“New York!” cried Carmen, with animation.  “The New York of the newspapers, of the country imagination; the New York as it is known in Paris is in Wall Street and in the palaces up-town.  Who are the kings of Wall Street, and who build the palaces up-town?  They say that there are no Athenians in Athens, and no Romans in Rome.  How many New-Yorkers are there in New York?  Do New-Yorkers control the capital, rule the politics, build the palaces, direct the newspapers, furnish the entertainment, manufacture the literature, set the pace in society?  Even the socialists and mobocrats are not native.  Successive invaders, as in Rome, overrun and occupy the town.