A long time ago, when Duane Bellamy was at the height of his brilliant fame, and when I was a little girl, his daughter chanced to be a school-mate of mine for a winter. And one Sunday evening I was invited to their supper-table. I was very much impressed by the momentous occasion which it seemed to me, and I have not forgotten a word he said, nor a gesture he made, nor an expression of his face. I can still see his darkly handsome face, with his glossy black mane, his large bright eyes, his great curling Assyrian beard. And if ever I saw a human being saturated to the bone with satisfaction, it was at that Sunday evening supper. He was acclaimed as the greatest portrait painter in America, and he accepted this well-deserved reputation with no mock modesty. The knowledge of it did not make him coarsely vain or puffed up. It acted on him like a generous wine, made him extravagantly kind and over-flowing with high spirits. His little girl told me that night that her princely father had been known to stop a tired coal-heaver at his work, hand him a twenty-dollar bill and walk on. He was like a great fountain of enjoyment, splashing with its clear waters all who came near it, even the little schoolgirl at the other end of the table. But there were people he could not help to enjoyment. The name of one of them came up in the conversation that evening: “Poor old Hendricks!” said our host, “what can you do for the poor old chap? _He_ doesn’t even know what hit him!” One of the younger painters there was a protégé of Bellamy’s, admiring him so greatly that his paintings were scarcely to be told from his master’s. He now answered, “Oh, the old Rip Van Winkle! He ought to be told to crawl into his hole and pull it in after him. Making a laughing-stock of himself with those sooty old landscapes of his, year after year.” Our host took a great draught of the beer in his stein, wiped his great mustache with his fine damask napkin, and turned comfortably in his chair. “Hendrick got me in a tight place the other day,” he began, “At this year’s exhibition he marched me up to one of his bitumen-black, woolly horrors, and said, ‘Now, Bellamy, you’re an honest man. Tell me what it is you youngsters don’t like in that? It looks all right to me. I can’t see why they all jump on me so. I look at theirs, and then I look at mine.... I _can’t_ see what they’re talking about.’” “Well, for God’s sake, what nerve!” ejaculated the disciple, very much astonished. “What did you say?”