rld so clever a man should _not_
have been clever. "Obert," I accordingly took upon myself to remark,
"had evidently laboured under some extraordinary delusion. He must
literally have doubted if Long _was_ clever."

"Fancy!" Mrs. Server explained with a charming smile at Long, who, still
looking pleasantly competent and not too fatuous, amiably returned it.

"They're natural, they're natural," I privately reflected; "that is,
he's natural to _her_, but he's not so to me." And as if seeing depths
in this, and to try it, I appealed to him. "Do, my dear man, let us have
it again. It's the picture, of all pictures, that most needs an
interpreter. _Don't_ we want," I asked of Mrs. Server, "to know what it
means?" The figure represented is a young man in black--a quaint, tight
black dress, fashioned in years long past; with a pale, lean, livid face
and a stare, from eyes without eyebrows, like that of some whitened
old-world clown. In his hand he holds an object that strikes the
spectator at first simply as some obscure, some ambiguous work of art,
but that on a second view becomes a representation of a human face,
modelled and coloured, in wax, in enamelled metal, in some substance not
human. The object thus appears a complete mask, such as might have been
fantastically fitted and worn.

"Yes, what in the world does it mean?" Mrs. Server replied. "One could
call it--though that doesn't get one much further--the Mask of Death."

"Why so?" I demanded while we all again looked at the picture. "Isn't it
much rather the Mask of Life? It's the man's own face that's Death. The
other one, blooming and beautiful----"

"Ah, but with an awful grimace!" Mrs. Server broke in.

"The other one, blooming and beautiful," I repeated, "is Life, and he's
going to put it on; unless indeed he has just taken it off."

"He's dreadful, he's awful--that's what I mean," said Mrs. Server. "But
what does Mr. Long think?"

"The artificial face, on the other hand," I went on, as Long now said
nothing, "is extremely studied and, when you carefully look at it,
charmingly pretty. I don't see the grimace."

"I don't see anything else!" Mrs. Server good-humouredly insisted. "And
what does Mr. Obert think?"

He kept his eyes on her a moment before replying. "He thinks it looks
like a lovely lady."

"That grinning mask? What lovely lady?"

"It does," I declared to him, really seeing what he meant--"it does look
remarkably like Mrs. Server."

She