manipulator of investments, did not inherit old
Jonathan's artistic sensibilities, and was content to live and die in
the unmodified black walnut and red rep of his predecessor. It was only
in Paul that the grandfather's aesthetic faculty revived, and Mrs.
Ambrose used often to say to her husband, as they watched the little
pale-browed boy poring over an old number of the _Art Journal:_ "Paul
will know how to appreciate your father's treasures."

In recognition of these transmitted gifts Paul, on leaving Harvard, was
sent to Paris with a tutor, and established in a studio in which
nothing was ever done. He could not paint, and recognized the fact
early enough to save himself much wasted labor and his friends many
painful efforts in dissimulation. But he brought back a touching
enthusiasm for the forms of beauty which an old civilization had
revealed to him and an apostolic ardour in the cause of their
dissemination.

He had paused in his harangue to take in my ill-timed parenthesis, and
the color mounted slowly to his thin cheek-bones.

"It _is_ an ugly room," he owned, as though he had noticed the library
for the first time.

The desk was carved at the angles with the heads of helmeted knights
with long black-walnut moustaches. The red cloth top was worn
thread-bare, and patterned like a map with islands and peninsulas of
ink; and in its centre throned a massive bronze inkstand representing a
Syrian maiden slumbering by a well beneath a palm-tree.

"The fact is," I said, walking home that evening with Ned Halidon, "old
Paul will never do anything, for the simple reason that he's too
stingy."

Ned, who was an idealist, shook his handsome head. "It's not that, my
dear fellow. He simply doesn't see things when they're too close to
him. I'm glad you woke him up to that desk."

The next time I dined with Paul he said, when we entered the library,
and I had gently rejected one of his cheap cigars in favour of a
superior article of my own: "Look here, I've been looking round for a
decent writing-table. I don't care, as a rule, to turn out old things,
especially when they've done good service, but I see now that this is
too monstrous--"

"For an apostle of beauty to write his evangel on," I agreed, "it _is_
a little inappropriate, except as an awful warning."

Paul colored. "Well, but, my dear fellow, I'd no idea how much a table
of this kind costs. I find I can't get anything decent--the plainest
mahogany--under