than it could hope ever to use. The residue, consisting
principally of stock in the Plumbers' Supply Company, went to Stanwood,
with the earnest wish that his nephew enter and eventually assume the
direction of the business with which the family name had been so long and
so honorably identified.

Stanwood received the news with modified rapture. He was grateful for
financial independence, but the idea of taking up the bathtub business
struck him with dismay. So with prudent forethought he sought out Amory
Carruth, a lawyer of his acquaintance; and to him explained his dilemma.
It required some measure of specious ingenuity to explain his errand as
he wished; but Mr. Carruth, being used to squirming legatees, understood
and came to the point with a candor which made Pelgram wince. After
first flippantly suggesting that the plumbing business would at least
afford Pelgram the chance to indulge his taste in porcelains, he eased
the artist's mind by a phrase as soothing as it was noncommittal.

"You can follow your uncle's will as regards the disposition of his
property. That part is sane enough. Whether it was equally sagacious,
equally sane, to try to plunge you into the plumbing business is not so
clear. We are, therefore, clearly justified if we say that he knew how
he wished to dispose of his estate, but his mental condition was such
that his legatee felt justified in modifying--in some degree--certain of
his requests."

This apologetic theory was finally accepted. Dawes, the manager, whose
surplus income had gone into the bank rather than into his liver,
purchased the estate's interest, and on the proceeds Stanwood had now for
five years been conducting his elaborate studio on Copley Square.

The completion of Miss Maitland's portrait was marked by one of the
artist's characteristic functions. By any person in the ordinary walks
of life it would have been called a tea, but Pelgram preferred to
denominate it a private view. Every time he completed a work that he
considered of real importance--relatively more often than modesty might
have prescribed--he celebrated the birth of the masterpiece by one of
these oddly termed baptisms in tannin. Possibly they were entitled to be
called views, as the opus bravely challenged the tea table in popularity,
and occasionally won by superior powers of endurance over a necessarily
limited supply of edibles, but certainly the privacy was questionable, as
to each one of t