Ward is a portrait-painter, and in the matter of vogue there seem to be
no pinnacles left for him to surmount. I think he has painted most of
the very rich women of fashion who have come to Paris of late years, and
he has become so prosperous, has such a polite celebrity, and his
opinions upon art are so conclusively quoted, that the friendship of
some of us who started with him has been dangerously strained.

He lives a well-ordered life; he has always led that kind of life. Even
in his student days when I first knew him, I do not remember an occasion
upon which the principal of a New England high-school would have
criticised his conduct. And yet I never heard anyone call him a prig;
and, so far as I know, no one was ever so stupid as to think him one. He
was a quiet, good-looking, well-dressed boy, and he matured into a
somewhat reserved, well-poised man, of impressive distinction in
appearance and manner. He has always been well tended and cared for by
women; in his student days his mother lived with him; his sister, Miss
Elizabeth, looks after him now. She came with him when he returned to
Paris after his disappointment in the unfortunate Harman affair, and she
took charge of all his business--as well as his social--arrangements
(she has been accused of a theory that the two things may be happily
combined), making him lease a house in an expensively modish quarter
near the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. Miss Elizabeth is an instinctively
fashionable woman, practical withal, and to her mind success should be
not only respectable but "smart." She does not speak of the "right bank"
and the "left bank" of the Seine; she calls them the "right bank" and
the "wrong bank." And yet, though she removed George (her word is
"rescued") from many of his old associations with Montparnasse, she
warmly encouraged my friendship with him--yea, in spite of my living so
deep in the wrong bank that the first time he brought her to my studio,
she declared she hadn't seen anything so like Bring-the-child-to-the-