yed another mermaid--Rita in_ the tub--and two
babies from photographs and "chic"--very bad; but as usual it was very
quickly marked sold.

Annan had a portrait of his sister Alice, poorly painted and even
recognised by some of her more intimate friends. Clive Gail offered one
of his marines--waves splashing and dashing all over the canvas so
realistically that women instinctively stepped back and lifted their
skirts, and men looked vaguely around for a waiter--at least Ogilvy said
so. As for Neville, he had a single study to show--a full length--just
the back and head and the soft contour of limbs melting into a
luminously sombre background--a masterpiece in technical perfection,
which was instantly purchased by a wise and Western millionaire, and
which left the public staring but unmoved.

But it was Jose Querida who dominated the whole show, flooding
everything with the splendour of his sunshine so that all else in the
same room looked cold or tawdry or washed out. His canvas, with its
superbly vigorous drawing, at once became the sensation of the
exhibition. Sunday supplements reproduced it with a photograph of
Querida looking amiably at a statuette of Venus which he held in his
long, tapering fingers; magazines tried to print it in two colours, in
three, in dozens, and made fireworks of it to Querida's inwardly
suppressed agony, and their own satisfaction. Serious young men wrote
"appreciations" about it; serious young women published instructive
discourses concerning it in the daily papers. Somebody in the valuable
columns of the _Tribune_ inquired whether Querida's painting was meant
to be symbolical; somebody in the _Nation_ said yes; somebody in the
_Sun_ said no; somebody in something or other explained its
psychological subtleties; somebody in something else screamed, "bosh!"

Meanwhile the discussion was a god-send to fashionable diners-out and to
those cultivated leaders of society who prefer to talk through the Opera
and philharmonic.

In what the educated daily press calls the "world of art" and the "realm
of literature," Querida's picture was discussed intelligently and
otherwise, but it _was_ discussed--from the squalid table d'hote, where
unmanicured genius punctures the air with patois and punches holes in it
with frenzied thumbs, to quiet, cultivated homes, where community of
taste restricts the calling lists--from the noisy studio, where pianos
and girls make evenings lively, to the austere bare