The professor of rhetoric looked an uneasy fear that he was being ridiculed. "I only repeated the village notion of him," he said airily. "He may have been anything. All I know is that he was as secretive as a clam, and about as interesting personally." "Look at the picture," said the critic, still laughing; "you'll know all about him!" The professor of rhetoric nodded. "You're right, he doesn't look much like my character of him. I never seem to have had a good, square look at him before. I've heard several people say the same thing, that they seemed to understand him better from the portrait than from his living face. There was something about his eyes that kept you from thinking of anything but what he was saying." The critic agreed. "The eyes are wonderful ... ruthless in their power ... fires of hell." He laughed a deprecating apology for his overemphatic metaphor and suggested: "It's possible that there was more to the professorial life than met the eye. Had he a wife?" "No; it was always a joke in the village that he would never look at a woman." The critic glanced up at the smoldering eyes of the portrait and smiled. "I've heard of that kind of a man before," he said. "Never known to drink, either, I suppose?" "Cold-water teetotaler," laughed the professor, catching the spirit of the occasion. "Look at the color in that nose!" said the critic. "I fancy that the ascetic moralist--" A very young man, an undergraduate who had been introduced as the junior usher, nodded his head. "Yep, a lot of us fellows always thought old Grid a little too good to be true." An older man with the flexible mouth of a politician now ventured a contribution to a conversation no longer bafflingly esthetic: "His father, old Governor Gridley, wasn't he ... Well, I guess you're right about the son. No halos were handed down in _that_ family!" The laugh which followed this speech was stopped by the approach of Fallères, his commanding presence dwarfing the president beside him. He was listening with a good-natured contempt to the apparently rather anxious murmurs of the latter. "Of course I know, Mr. Fallères, it is a great deal to ask, but she is so insistent ... she won't go away and continues to make the most distressing spectacle of herself ... and several people, since she has said so much about it, are saying that the expression is not that of the late professor. Much against my will I promised to speak to you--" His mortified uneasiness was so great that the artist gave him a rescuing hand. "Well, Mr. President, what can I do in the matter? The man is dead. I cannot paint him over again, and if I could I would only do again as I did this time, choose that aspect which my judgment told me would make the best portrait. If his habitual vacant expression was not so interesting as another not so permanent a habit of his face ... why, the poor artist must be allowed some choice. I did not know I was to please his grandmother, and not posterity."