"I am glad to see you," said Mr. Sivwright. "I've been meaning to write to you, but I've been away, out of London." Mendel introduced him to his friends and asked him to sit down. "I can't stop a moment," said Mr. Sivwright. "I'm very busy. I have just started a club for artists--opens at eleven. These absurd closing hours, you know. I hope you'll join. It has been open a week. Great fun, and I want some frescoes painted. . . . I'm very proud of your success, Kühler. I feel I had my hand in it." He produced a prospectus and laid it on the table, bowed awkwardly to Oliver, and with a self-conscious swagger, as though he felt the eyes of all in the café upon him, made his way out. "Who's that broken-down tick?" asked Logan. "Sivwright," answered Mendel. "He taught me when I was a boy. He's a very bad artist, and he thinks art ended with Corot. I learned to paint like Corot. Really! I used to go with him to the Park and weep over the trees in the twilight: I never thought I should see him again." "Oh! people bob up," said Logan. "We go on getting longer in the tooth, but people recur, like decimals." "Would you like to go to his club?" asked Mendel. "It says 'Dancing.' I feel like dancing." "Oh! I love dancing," said she. Logan assumed his air of mysterious importance and said it was time to go to Tysoe's. "We're twenty minutes late," he said; "Tysoe would be dreadfully put out if we were punctual." As Mendel had plenty of money they took a taxi-cab. * * * * * Mr. Tilney Tysoe was an idealist, and he had no other profession. He was a very tall man with a long cadaverous face, great bulging, watery eyes, and extraordinarily long hands, which hung limply from his wrist, except when he was excited, when they shot up with extreme violence, and carried his arms with them into a gesture so awkward that he had to find relief from it in a shrug. He was devoted to the arts, had a stall at the opera, a study full of books, and several rooms full of pictures. An artist was to him a great artist, a book that pleased him was a great book, and his constant lament was over the dearth of great men in public life. It gave him the keenest delight to see Logan, unkempt, wild-haired, shaggy, violent and brusque, enter his daintily furnished drawing-room, and his eyes passed eagerly to Oliver, looking just as she ought to have done, the mistress of a Bohemian. "Delighted! Delighted!" he said as he coiled his long white hand round Mendel's workmanlike paw. "My wife, I regret to say, is away. She will be so sorry to have missed you. Like me, she is tired of the shallow, artificial people we live among. We both adore sincere, real people. I adore sincerity. Sincerity is genius." "That is true," said Logan in a sepulchral voice that made Mendel jump. "At least, where you find sincerity, you may be sure that genius is not far behind."