“Good morning, what about El Greco?” said a voice, all in one breath. The thin, long, skin-covered skeleton of Mr. Mallard hung over them like a guilty conscience. Mr. Mallard wrote every week in the _Hebdomadal Digest_. He had an immense knowledge of art, and a sincere dislike of all that was beautiful. The only modern painter whom he really admired was Hodler. All others were treated by him with a merciless savagery; he tore them to pieces in his weekly articles with all the holy gusto of a Calvinist iconoclast smashing images of the Virgin. “What about El Greco?” he repeated. He had a peculiarly passionate loathing of El Greco. Mr. Clew smiled up at him propitiatingly; he was afraid of Mr. Mallard. His enthusiasms were no match for Mr. Mallard’s erudite and logical disgusts. “I was merely quoting him as an example,” he said. “An example, I hope, of incompetent drawing, baroque composition, disgusting forms, garish colouring and hysterical subject-matter.” Mr. Mallard showed his old ivory teeth in a menacing smile. “Those are the only things which El Greco’s work exemplifies.” Mr. Clew gave a nervous little laugh. “What do you think of these?” he asked, pointing to Lypiatt’s canvases. “They look to me very ordinarily bad,” answered Mr. Mallard. The young assistant listened appalled. In a business like this, how was it possible to make good? “All the same,” said Mr. Clew courageously, “I like that bowl of roses in the window with the landscape behind. Number twenty-nine.” He looked in the catalogue. “And there’s a really charming little verse about it: ‘O beauty of the rose, Goodness as well as perfume exhaling! Who gazes on these flowers, On this blue hill and ripening field—he knows Where duty leads and that the nameless Powers In a rose can speak their will.’ Really charming!” Mr. Clew made another mark with his pencil. “But commonplace, commonplace.” Mr. Mallard shook his head. “And in any case a verse can’t justify a bad picture. What an unsubtle harmony of colour! And how uninteresting the composition is! That receding diagonal—it’s been worked to death.” He too made a mark in his catalogue—a cross and a little circle, arranged like the skull and cross-bones on a pirate’s flag. Mr. Mallard’s catalogues were always covered with these little marks: they were his symbols of condemnation. Mr. Albemarle, meanwhile, had moved away to greet the new arrivals. To the critic of the _Daily Cinema_ he had to explain that there were no portraits of celebrities. The reporter from the _Evening Planet_ had to be told which were the best pictures. “Mr. Lypiatt,” he dictated, “is a poet and philosopher as well as a painter. His catalogue is a—h’m—declaration of faith.”