The whole thing grated on my self-love and I became, in a contained way,
furiously angry. I was impressed with the idea that the man was only a
puppet in the hands of Fox and de Mersch, and that lot. And he gave
himself these airs of enormous distance. I, at any rate, was
clean-handed in the matter; I hadn't any axe to grind.

"Ah, yes," he said, hastily, "you are to draw my portrait--as Fox put
it. He sent me your Jenkins sketch. I read it--it struck a very nice
note. And so--." He sat himself down on a preposterously low chair, his
knees on a level with his chin. I muttered that I feared he would find
the process a bore.

"Not more for me than for you," he answered, seriously--"one has to do
these things."

"Why, yes," I echoed, "one has to do these things." It struck me that he
regretted it--regretted it intensely; that he attached a bitter meaning
to the words.

"And ... what is the procedure?" he asked, after a pause. "I am new to
the sort of thing." He had the air, I thought, of talking to some
respectable tradesman that one calls in only when one is _in
extremis_--to a distinguished pawnbroker, a man quite at the top of a
tree of inferior timber.

"Oh, for the matter of that, so am I," I answered. "I'm supposed to get
your atmosphere, as Callan put it."

"Indeed," he answered, absently, and then, after a pause, "You know