Brooks's, there had been disquieting gossip; the Pretorian Club, which is
often terribly right in such matters, agreed that he had been badly sold.
None of this I believed for an instant. What could one doubt in a picture
owned by Mantovani and certified by Anitchkoff? Upon this point of
rumination the train stopped at Prestonville.

My approach to the masterpiece was reverently deliberate. At the
American House I actually lingered over the fried steak and dallied long
with the not impossible mince pie. Thus fortified, I followed Main
Street to the Museum--one of those depressingly correct new-Greek
buildings with which the country is being filled. Skirting with a shiver
the bleak casts from the antique in the atrium and mounting an absurdly
spacious staircase, I reached a doorway through which the _chef
d'oeuvre_ of my dreams confronted me cheerlessly. Its nullity was
appalling; from afar I felt the physical uneasiness that an equivocal
picture will usually produce in a devotee. To approach and study it was
a civility I paid not to itself but to its worshipful _provenance_. A
slight inspection told all there was to tell. The paint was palpably
modern; the surface would not have resisted a pin. In style it was a
distant echo of the Giorgione at Berlin. Yet, as I gazed and wondered
sadly, I perceived it was not a vulgar forgery--indeed not a forgery at
all. It had been done to amuse some painter of antiquarian bent. I even
thought, too rashly, that I recognised the touch of the youthful Watts,
and I could imagine the studio revel at which he or another had
valiantly laid in a Giorgione before the punch, as his contribution to
the evening's merriment. The picture upon the pie wrought a black
depression that some excellent Japanese paintings were powerless to
dispel. As my train crawled up the tawny river, now inky, my thoughts
moved helplessly about the dark enigma--How could Mantovani have
possessed such rubbish? How could Anitchkoff, enjoying the use of his