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 the same time scornful of it. It seemed to contain not a few
ancient shams and hollow pretenders--

Ah! once more the soft, ingratiating voice beside him. Madame de
Pastourelles was expressing a flattering wish to see his picture, of