And the old gentleman sighed and looked with melancholy eyes at the picture on the genius's easel. It was a clever picture, but everything Frank Dobb did was clever, from his painting to his banjo playing. Clever was the true name for it, for of substantial merit it possessed none. He had begun to paint without learning to draw, and he could pick a tune out of any musical instrument extant without ever having mastered the mysteries of notes. He talked the most graceful of airy nothings, and could not cover a page of note paper without his orthography going lame, and all the rest of his small acquirements and accomplishments were proportionately shallow and incomplete. Paternal partiality laid it to his being too gifted to study, but the cold logic, which no ties of consanguinity influenced, ascribed it to laziness. Frank was, indeed, the idlest and best-natured fellow in the world. You never saw him busy, angry, or out of spirits. He painted a little, thrummed his guitar a little longer or rattled a tune off on his piano, smoked and read a great deal, and flirted still more, all in the same deliberate and easy-going way. Any excuse was sufficient to absolve him from serious work. So he lead a pleasant, useless life, with Dobb senior to pay the bills. He had the handsomest studio in New York, a studio for one of Ouida's heroes to luxuriate in. If the encouragement of picturesque surroundings could have made a painter of him he would have been a master. The fame of his studio, and the fact that he did not need the money, made his pictures sell. He was quite a lion in society, and it was regarded as a favor to be asked to call on him. He was the beau ideal of the artist of romance, and was accorded a romantic eminence accordingly. So, with his pictures to provide him with pocket money, and his father to see to the rest, he lived the life of a young prince, feted and flattered and spoiled, artistically despised by all the serious workers who knew him, and hated by some who envied him the commercial success he had no necessity for, but esteemed by most of us as a good fellow and his own worst enemy. Frank married his first wife while Dobb senior was still at the helm of his own affairs. She was a charming little woman whose acquaintance he had made when she visited his studio with a party of friends. She had not a penny, but he made a draft upon "the governor," as he called him, and the happy pair digested their honeymoon in Europe. They were absent six months, during which time he did not set brush to canvas. Then they returned, as he fancifully termed it, to go to work.