like a filagree figure from a clock when the hour strikes. On the
screen opposite the alcove was a large canvas with a great many
square tomato-colored blobs on it, and nothing else, so far as
Soames could see from where he sat. He looked at his catalogue:
"No. 32--'The Future Town'--Paul Post." 'I suppose that's satiric
too,' he thought. 'What a thing!' But his second impulse was more
cautious. It did not do to condemn hurriedly. There had been those
stripey, streaky creations of Monet's, which had turned out such
trumps; and then the stippled school; and Gauguin. Why, even since
the Post-Impressionists there had been one or two painters not to
be sneezed at. During the thirty-eight years of his connoisseur's
life, indeed, he had marked so many "movements," seen the tides of
taste and technique so ebb and flow, that there was really no
telling anything except that there was money to be made out of
every change of fashion. This too might quite well be a case where
one must subdue primordial instinct, or lose the market. He got up
and stood before the picture, trying hard to see it with the eyes
of other people. Above the tomato blobs was what he took to be a
sunset, till some one passing said: "He's got the airplanes
wonderfully, don't you think!" Below the tomato blobs was a band
of white with vertical black stripes, to which he could assign no
meaning whatever, till some one else came by, murmuring: "What
expression he gets with his foreground!" Expression? Of what?
Soames went back to his seat. The thing was "rich," as his father
would have said, and he wouldn't give a damn for it. Expression!
Ah! they were all Expressionists now, he had heard, on the
Continent. So it was coming here too, was it? He remembered the
first wave of influenza in 1887--or 8--hatched in China, so they
said. He wondered where this--this Expressionism--had been
hatched. The thing was a regular disease!