s. Stroud he was the 'coming' man, and she told
somebody else, and so it got to be true.... And he painted Stroud
without wincing; and she hung the picture among her husband's
things...."

He flung himself down in the arm-chair near mine, laid back his head,
and clasping his arms beneath it, looked up at the picture above the
chimney-piece.

"I like to fancy that Stroud himself would have given it to me, if he'd
been able to say what he thought that day."

And, in answer to a question I put half-mechanically--"Begin again?" he
flashed out. "When the one thing that brings me anywhere near him is
that I knew enough to leave off?"

He stood up and laid his hand on my shoulder with a laugh. "Only the
irony of it is that I _am_ still painting--since Grindle's doing it for
me! The Strouds stand alone, and happen once--but there's no
exterminating our kind of art."

THE POT-BOILER

I

The studio faced north, looking out over a dismal reach of roofs and
chimneys, and rusty fire-escapes hung with heterogeneous garments. A
crust of dirty snow covered the level surfaces, and a December sky with
more snow in it lowered over them.

The room was bare and gaunt, with blotched walls and a stained uneven
floor. On a divan lay a pile of "properties"--limp draperies, an
Algerian scarf, a moth-eaten fan of peacock feathers. The janitor had
forgotten to fill the coal-scuttle over-night, and the cast-iron stove
projected its cold flanks into the room like a black iceberg. Ned
Stanwell, who had just added his hat and great-coat to the
miscellaneous heap on the divan, turned from the empty stove with a
shiver.

"By Jove, this is a little too much like the last act of _Boheme_," he
said, slipping into his coat again after a vain glance at the
coal-scuttle. Much solitude, and a lively habit of mind, had bred in
him the habit of audible soliloquy, and having flung a shout for the
janitor down the seven flights dividing the studio from the basement,
he turned back, picking up the thread of his monologue. "Exactly like
_Boheme_, really--that crack in the wall is much more like a
stage-crack than a real one--just the sort of crack Mungold would paint
if he were doing a Humble Interior."

Mungold, the fashionable portrait-painter of the hour, was the
favourite object of the younger men's irony.

"It only needs Kate Arran to be borne in dying," Stanwell continued
with a laugh. "Much more likely to be poor little Caspar, though,