of energy. He said, "What could a man do whose unnatural father
had left his own nose away from him?" This amused but did not satisfy
the merchant. "You must do something," he said; "and it's for you to
choose. If you don't like the India trade, go into something else.
Or, take up law or medicine. No Corey yet ever proposed to do
nothing." "Ah, then, it's quite time one of us made a beginning," urged
the man who was then young, and who was now old, looking into the
somewhat fierce eyes of his father's portrait. He had inherited as
little of the fierceness as of the nose, and there was nothing
predatory in his son either, though the aquiline beak had come down to
him in such force. Bromfield Corey liked his son Tom for the
gentleness which tempered his energy.

"Well let us compromise," he seemed to be saying to his father's
portrait. "I will travel." "Travel? How long?" the keen eyes demanded.
"Oh, indefinitely. I won't be hard with you, father." He could see the
eyes soften, and the smile of yielding come over his father's face; the
merchant could not resist a son who was so much like his dead mother.
There was some vague understanding between them that Bromfield Corey
was to come back and go into business after a time, but he never did
so. He travelled about over Europe, and travelled handsomely,
frequenting good society everywhere, and getting himself presented at
several courts, at a period when it was a distinction to do so. He had
always sketched, and with his father's leave he fixed himself at Rome,
where he remained studying art and rounding the being inherited from
his Yankee progenitors, till there was very little left of the
ancestral angularities. After ten years he came home and painted that
portrait of his father. It was very good, if a little amateurish, and
he might have made himself a name as a painter of portraits if he had
not had so much money. But he had plenty of money, though by this time
he was married and beginning to have a family. It was absurd for him
to paint portraits for pay, and ridiculous to paint them for nothing;
so he did not paint them at all. He continued a dilettante, never
quite abandoning his art, but working at it fitfully, and talking more
about it than working at it. He had his theory of Titian's method; and
now and then a Bostonian insisted upon buying a picture of him. After
a while he hung it more and more inconspicuously, and said
apologetically, "Oh yes!