daughter?'

'My name is Philips,' I reminded him pleasantly, remembering that the
intelligence of clever people is often limited to a single art. 'Miss
Harris is the daughter of Mr. Edward Harris, Secretary of the Government
of India in the Legislative Department. She is fond of pictures. We have
a good many tastes in common. We have always suspected that India had
never been painted, and when we saw your things at the Town Hall we knew
it.'

His queer eyes dilated, and he blushed.

'Oh,' he said, 'it's only one interpretation. It all depends on what a
fellow sees. No fellow can see everything.'

'Till you came,' I insisted, 'nobody had seen anything.'

He shook his head, but I could read in his face that this was not news
to him.

'That is mainly what I came up to tell you,' I continued, 'to beg that
you will go on and on. To hope that you will stay a long time and do a
great deal. It is such an extraordinary chance that any one should turn
up who can say what the country really means.'

He stuck his hands in his pockets with a restive movement. 'Oh, don't
make me feel responsible,' he said, 'I hate that;' and then suddenly he
remembered his manners. 'But it's certainly nice of you to think so,' he
added.

There was something a little unusual in his inflection which led me to
ask at this point whether he was an American, and to discover that he
came from somewhere in Wisconsin, not directly, but by way of a few
years in London and Paris. This accounted in a way for the effect of
freedom in any fortune about him for which I already liked him, and
perhaps partly for the look of unembarrassed inquiry and experiment
which sat so lightly in his unlined face. He came, one realized, out of
the fermentation of new conditions; he never could have been the product
of our limits and systems and classes in England. His surroundings, his
'things,' as he called them, were as old as the sense of beauty, but
he seemed simply to have put them where he could see them, there was no
pose in their arrangement. They were all good, and his delight in them
was plain; but he was evidently in no sense a connoisseur beyond that of
natural instinct. Some of those he had picked up in India I could tell
him about, but I had no impression that he would remember what I said.
There was one Bokhara tapestry I examined with a good deal of interest.

'Yes,' he said, 'they told me I shouldn't get anything as good as that
out here, so I brought