ve
over--have something?"

Peter looked up smiling: "Not now, Holker. I will later."

Morris kept on talking. Lagarge, his companion--a thin,
cadaverous-looking man with a big head and the general air of having
been carved out of an old root--a great expert in ceramics--listening
intently, bobbing his head in toy-mandarin fashion whenever one of
Holker's iconoclasms cleared the air.

"Suppose they did pay thirty thousand dollars for it," Holker insisted,
slapping his knee with his outspread palm. "That makes the picture no
better and no worse. If it was mine, and I could afford it, I would sell
it to anybody who loved it for thirty cents rather than sell it to a man
who didn't, for thirty millions. When Troyon painted it he put his soul
into it, and you can no more tack a price to that than you can stick
an auction card on a summer cloud, or appraise the perfume from a rose
garden. It has no money value, Legarge, and never will have. You might
as well list sunsets on the Stock Exchange."

"But Troyon had to live, Holker," chimed in Harrington, who, with
the freedom accorded every member of the club--one of its greatest
charms--had just joined the group and sat listening.

"Yes," rejoined Morris, a quizzjeal expression crossing his face--"that
was the curse of it. He was born a man and had a stomach instead of
being born a god without one. As to living--he didn't really live--no
great painter really lives until he is dead. And that's the way it
should be--they would never have become immortal with a box full of
bonds among their assets. They would have stopped work. Now they can
rest in their graves with the consciousness that they have done their
level best."

"There is one thing would lift him out of it, or ought to," remarked
Harrington, with a glance around the circle. "I am, of course, speaking
of Troyon."

"What?" asked Morris.

"The news that Roberts paid thirty thousand dollars for a picture for
which the painter was glad to get three thousand francs," a reply which
brought a roar from the group, Morris joining in heartily.

The circle had now widened to the filling of a dozen chairs, Morris's
way of putting things being one of the features of club nights, he, as
usual, dominating the talk, calling out "Period"--his way of notifying
some speaker to come to a full stop, whenever he broke away from the
facts and began soaring into hyperbolics--Morgan, Harrington and the
others laughing in unison at his