THE RECOVERY


To the visiting stranger Hillbridge's first question was, "Have you seen
Keniston's things?" Keniston took precedence of the colonial State House,
the Gilbert Stuart Washington and the Ethnological Museum; nay, he ran neck
and neck with the President of the University, a prehistoric relic who had
known Emerson, and who was still sent about the country in cotton-wool to
open educational institutions with a toothless oration on Brook Farm.

Keniston was sent about the country too: he opened art exhibitions, laid
the foundation of academies, and acted in a general sense as the spokesman
and apologist of art. Hillbridge was proud of him in his peripatetic
character, but his fellow-townsmen let it be understood that to "know"
Keniston one must come to Hillbridge. Never was work more dependent for its
effect on "atmosphere," on _milieu_. Hillbridge was Keniston's milieu,
and there was one lady, a devotee of his art, who went so far as to assert
that once, at an exhibition in New York, she had passed a Keniston without
recognizing it. "It simply didn't want to be seen in such surroundings; it
was hiding itself under an incognito," she declared.

It was a source of special pride to Hillbridge that it contained all the
artist's best works. Strangers were told that Hillbridge had discovered
him. The discovery had come about in the simplest manner. Professor
Driffert, who had a reputation for "collecting," had one day hung a sketch
on his drawing-room wall, and thereafter Mrs. Driffert's visitors (always
a little flurried by the sense that it was the kind of house in which one
might be suddenly called upon to distinguish between a dry-point and an
etching, or between Raphael Mengs and Raphael Sanzio) were not infrequently
subjected to the Professor's off-hand inquiry, "By-the-way, have you seen