me, the wagging of gossip tongues
fanned the air, and scraps, hints, fragments of scandal were wafted to
my ears as I stood amazed to salute his art in the superb masterpiece of
portraiture.

From the confused babble I was straining to sift a grain of truth. It
seemed that Wallace Wray had been outraging the feelings of his
admirers, had dealt them a slap in the face as cleanly, or rather as
dirtily, as a realistic brush could deal it. In the nick of time, Spry,
a brother of the craft and the very sieve I needed, jostled at my elbow.

"Splendid likeness--the best he has ever done, eh? He calls it 'The Body
of Me.' Ha! ha! The Corporation of H---- commissioned, it, and luckily
he got it finished before he took leave of his senses."

"Senses!" I echoed, stupidly. "What is wrong? What has he been saying,
doing?"

"More antics! Haven't you seen 'The Soul of Me,' there, in the next
room?"

And Spry, scarcely waiting for dissent, led off, inviting me, by
backward twists of the head, to follow his pioneering.

The crowd was too great for conversation, but it was easy to know from
the congested state of the room in a particular spot where Wray's work
must be hung. When patience was nearly exhausted we reached it. Comments
and criticisms were freely bandied aloud.

"Decidedly morbid," spake a sightseer in disgust.

"Hideous! I wouldn't own such a picture for worlds," confided one woman
to another.

"It is astounding," an art critic remarked to his companion, whose face
I knew. "What power, what genius, yet----"

"Genius is a loganstone," said the other, shaking his head. "It rocks
and rocks, but a stalk of asphodel may shift it from its centre."

"For 'asphodel' translate 'woman,'" the critic replied, "and you solve
the riddle."

At this moment a gap opened; it was sufficiently wide to reveal the
subject without the frame of the picture.

On a slab of wood in semi-darkness lay a drowned woman. The rays from a
lamp, held aloft by a bargee or coal-heaver, flickered down on the
green-grey features that had already lost the expression which
accompanies the first beatitude of death. Some outcast, as the worn
finery proved; young in years, we knew by the modelling of her throat;
aged in worldliness, by the hard set of her features, the sparse strands
of faded hair that might once have glittered. The folds of the frayed
gown hung lank, heavy with dark drops of liquid mud which oozed and fell
slowly to the ground, alre