It was a merry Sunday evening of merry England in the month of March, 1912. After a long day of unremitting but not very remunerative toil, George had gone to call on his friend, Mr. Frank Upjohn. The word “friend” is here, as nearly always, inexact, if by friend is meant one who feels for another a disinterested affection unaccompanied by sexual desire. (Friendship accompanied by sexual desire is love, the phœnix or unicorn of passions.) In the case of George and Mr. Upjohn there was at least a truce to the instinctive hostility and grudging which human beings almost invariably feel for one another. Ties of mutual self-interest bound them. George made jokes and Mr. Upjohn laughed at them: and vice versa. Mr. Upjohn desired to make George a disciple, and George was not averse from making use of Mr. Upjohn. Mutual admiration, implied if not expressed and perhaps not wholly insincere, enabled them to form a small protective nucleus against the oceanic indifference of mankind; and thus feel superior to it. They ate together, and even lent each other small sums of money without security. The word “friend” is therefore justified _à peu près_. Needless to say, Mr. Upjohn was a very great man. He was a Painter. Since he was destitute of any intrinsic and spontaneous originality, he strove much to be original, and invented a new school of painting every season. He first created a sensation with his daring and brilliant “Christ in a Bloomsbury Brothel,” which was denounced in no unmeasured terms by the Press, ever tender for the Purity of Public Morals and the posthumous reputation of Our Lord. “The Blessed Damozel in Hell” passed almost unnoticed, when fortunately the model most unjustly obtained an affiliation order against Mr. Upjohn, and thus drew attention to a neglected masterpiece, which was immediately bought by a man who had made a fortune in intimate rubber goods. Mr. Upjohn then became aware of the existence of modern French art. One season he painted in gorgeous Pointilliste blobs, the next in monotone Fauviste smears, then in calamitous Futuriste accidents of form and colour. At this moment he was just about to launch the Suprematist movement in painting, to which he hoped to convert George, or at any rate to get him to write an article about it. Suprematist painting, which has now unfortunately gone out of fashion, was, as its name implies, the supreme point of modern art. Mr. Upjohn produced two pictures in illustration (the word is perhaps inaccurate) of his theories. One was a beautiful scarlet whorl on a background of the purest flake white. The other at first sight appeared to be a brood of bulbous yellow chickens, with thick elongated necks, aimlessly scattered over a grey-green meadow; but on closer inspection the chickens turned out to be conventionalized phalluses. The first was called Decomposition-Cosmos, and the second Op. 49. Piano.