ck
depression that some excellent Japanese paintings were powerless to
dispel. As my train crawled up the tawny river, now inky, my thoughts
moved helplessly about the dark enigma--How could Mantovani have
possessed such rubbish? How could Anitchkoff, enjoying the use of his
eyes and mind, have credited it for a moment? My reflections
preposterously failed to rest upon the obvious clue, the mysterious
Marquesa del Puente, and it was not until I met Anitchkoff, some years
later, that I began to divine the woman in the case.

After ten years of absence he had come back to America on something like
a triumphal tour. I had promptly paid my respects and now through a
discreet persistency was to have a long evening with him at the
Pretorian. As I studied the dinner card, guessing at his gastronomic
tastes, my mind was naturally on his remarkable career. Anitchkoff,
brought from Russia in childhood, had grown up in decent poverty in a
small New England city. Very early he showed the intellectual ambition
that distinguished all the family. Our excellent public schools made his
way to the nearest country college easy and inevitable. There began the
struggle the traces of which might be read in an almost melancholy
gravity quite unnatural in a man become famous at thirty-five. With the
facility of his race he learned all the languages in the curriculum and
read ferociously in many literatures. In his junior year the appearance
of a great and genial work on psychology made him the metaphysician he
has remained through all digressions in the connoisseurship and criticism
of art. How his search for ultimate principles involved a mastery of the
minutiae of the Venetian school I could only guess. But one could imagine
the process. Seeking to ground his personal preferences in a general
esthetic, he would have found his data absolutely untrustworthy. How
could he presume to interpret a Giorgione or a Titian when what they
painted was undetermined? Upon these shifting sands he declined to rear
his tabernacle. To the work of classifying the Venetians, accordingly, he
set himself with dogged honesty. As a matter of course Mantovani became
his chief preceptor--Mantovani who first discovered that the highly
complex organism we call a work of art has a morphology as definite as
that of a trilobite; that the artist may no more transcend his own forms
than a crustacean may become a vertebrate. For a matter of ten years
Anitchkoff, espousing a