shocked the
susceptibilities, but it was the hideous human attributes patent in the
brute that disgusted the imagination. With a terrible cunning of mind
and brush the artist had laid bare a vice that civilization cloaks.

For two or three minutes the boy stood immovable, then he looked back
over his shoulder, and the man behind him was surprised at the
expression that had overspread his face, the sombre light that glowed in
his eyes. In a moment the adventurer was lost, another being had come
uppermost--a strange, unexpected being.

"What do you think of this picture?"

The Irishman did not answer for a moment, then his eyes returned to the
canvas and his tongue was loosed.

"If you want to know," he said, "I think it's the most damnable thing
I've ever seen. When the Gallic mind runs to morbidity there's nothing
to touch it for filth."

"Why filth?"

"Why filth? My dear boy, look at this--and this!" He pointed to the
other pictures, each a study of monkey life, each a travesty of some
human passion.

The boy obeyed, conscientiously and slowly, then once more his eyes
challenged his companion's.

"I say again, why filth?"

"Because there is enough of the beast in every man without advertising
it."

"You admit that there is something of the beast in every man?"

"Naturally."

"Then why fear to see it?" The boy's face was pale, his eyes still
challenged.

The other made a gesture of impatience. "It isn't a question of fear;
it is a question of--well, of taste."

"Taste!" The boy tossed the word to scorn.

"What would you substitute?"

"Truth." There was a tremor in his voice, a veil seemed to fall upon his
youth, arresting its carelessness, sobering its vitality.

The Irishman raised his brows. "Truth, eh?"

"Yes. It is only possible to live when we know life truly, see it and
value it truly."

"There may be perverted truth."

"You say that because this truth we speak of displeases you; yet this is
no more a perversion of the truth than"--he glanced round the
walls--"than that, for example; yet you would approve of that."

He waved his hand toward another painting, a delicate and charming
conception of a half-clothed woman, a picture in which the flesh-tints,
the drapery, the lights all harmonized with exquisite art.

"You would approve of that because it pleases your eye and soothes your
senses, yet you know that all womankind is not slim and graciou--that
all life is not lived in boudoirs