ew all about Arthur Welby; his name
and fame were in all the studios. The author of the picture of the
year--in the opinion, at least, of the cultivated minority for whom
rails and policemen were not the final arbiters of merit; glorified in
the speeches at the Academy banquet; and already overwhelmed with more
commissions than he could take--Welby should have been one of the
best hated of men. On the contrary, his mere temperament had drawn
the teeth of that wild beast, Success. Well-born, rich, a social
favourite, trained in Paris and Italy, an archaeologist and student as
well as a painter, he commanded the world as he pleased. Society asked
him to dinners, and he gave himself no professional airs and went
when he could. But among his fellows he lived a happy comrade's life,
spending his gifts and his knowledge without reserve, always ready to
help a man in a tight place, to praise a friend's picture, to take up
a friend's quarrel. He took his talent and his good-fortune so simply
that the world must needs insist upon them, instead of contesting
them.

As for his pictures, they were based on the Italian tradition--rich,
accurate, learned, full of literary allusion and reminiscence. In
Fenwick's eyes, young as was their author, they were of the past
rather than of the future. He contemptuously thought of them as
belonging to a dead _genre_. But the man who painted them could
_draw_.

Meanwhile he seemed to have lost Madame de Pastourelles, and must
needs fall back on the private secretary beside him. This gentleman,
who had already entered him on the tablets of the mind as a mannerless
outsider, was not particularly communicative. But at least Fenwick
learned the names of the other guests. The well-known Ambassador
beside Lady Findon, with a shrewd, thin, sulky face, and very black
eyes under whitish hair--eyes turned much more frequently on the
pretty actress to his right than upon his hostess; a financier
opposite, much concerned with great colonial projects; the Cabinet
Minister--of no account, it seemed, either in the House or the
Cabinet--and his wife, abnormally thin, and far too discreet for the
importance of her husband's position; a little farther, the wife of
the red-haired Academician, a pale, frightened creature who looked
like her husband's apology, and was in truth his slave;--all these he
learned gradually to discriminate.

So this was the great world. He was stormily pleased to be in it,
and at th