n, I had always
_felt_ there was no one like him--only I had gone with the stream,
echoed the usual platitudes about him, till I half got to think he was
a failure, one of the kind that are left behind. By Jove, and he _was_
left behind--because he had come to stay! The rest of us had to let
ourselves be swept along or go under, but he was high above the
current--on everlasting foundations, as you say.

"Well, I went off to the house in my most egregious mood--rather moved,
Lord forgive me, at the pathos of poor Stroud's career of failure being
crowned by the glory of my painting him! Of course I meant to do the
picture for nothing--I told Mrs. Stroud so when she began to stammer
something about her poverty. I remember getting off a prodigious phrase
about the honour being _mine_--oh, I was princely, my dear Rickham! I
was posing to myself like one of my own sitters.

"Then I was taken up and left alone with him. I had sent all my traps
in advance, and I had only to set up the easel and get to work. He had
been dead only twenty-four hours, and he died suddenly, of heart
disease, so that there had been no preliminary work of destruction--his
face was clear and untouched. I had met him once or twice, years
before, and thought him insignificant and dingy. Now I saw that he was
superb.

"I was glad at first, with a merely aesthetic satisfaction: glad to
have my hand on such a 'subject.' Then his strange life-likeness began
to affect me queerly--as I blocked the head in I felt as if he were
watching me do it. The sensation was followed by the thought: if he
_were_ watching me, what would he say to my way of working? My strokes
began to go a little wild--I felt nervous and uncertain.

"Once, when I looked up, I seemed to see a smile behind his close
grayish beard--as if he had the secret, and were amusing himself by
holding it back from me. That exasperated me still more. The secret?
Why, I had a secret worth twenty of his! I dashed at the canvas
furiously, and tried some of my bravura tricks. But they failed me,
they crumbled. I saw that he wasn't watching the showy bits--I couldn't
distract his attention; he just kept his eyes on the hard passages
between. Those were the ones I had always shirked, or covered up with
some lying paint. And how he saw through my lies!

"I looked up again, and caught sight of that sketch of the donkey
hanging on the wall near his bed. His wife told me afterward it was the
last thing he ha