“What could I say?” said Bellamy. “I didn’t want to hurt the old man’s feelings. I hadn’t supposed till then that he’d so much as noticed how people feel about his work. I didn’t try to explain to him, of course. What’s the use? He _can’t_ understand! If I’d talked to him all day about what we’re after--light, and shimmer, and vibration--he wouldn’t have known what I was talking about. If it were _in_ him to understand, he’d die before he’d paint the way he does. So I just patted him on the back and said, ‘Oh, you’re all right, Mr. Hendricks. What makes you think there is anything the matter with your work?’ and pretended that somebody was calling to me from the other side of the gallery.” He finished his beer at a draught. He thought himself magnificently kind and tolerant. And so did we. That was a long time ago, thirty years ago, to be exact. The Bellamys took their little girl out of our school that spring, and I saw no more of them. But I always felt a slight personal interest at the sight of his name in a list of exhibitors, and in picture-galleries always went to look at whichever bright, high-keyed, dashing portrait he was exhibiting that year. Some years ago it began to seem to me that they did not look just the same; and yet when I looked straight at them, I saw that they were, quite miraculously, the same, the old Bellamy flowing brush-work, the masterly rendering of fabrics, the ringing color, the firm drawing, all lighted by that bold flood of sunlight with which he had shocked and enchanted the early American public groping its way out from Munich. Presently, finding that the impression that they were different persisted, I set myself to analyze it, and found that their altered look came from the altered character of the paintings beside and above them ... and then, as the years went on, below them! For the time came when the annual Bellamy portrait was not in the center of the last gallery, to catch your eye as you entered, but was hung high in one of the side-rooms. It looked very queer and matter-of-fact with its solid surfaces honestly rendered in all their opacity, compared to the odd, subtle, sideways-glancing, arrestingly imaginative canvases about it. They took the eye far below the surfaces they depicted. They suggested far more than they said. For days afterwards, they haunted you like an unfinished cadence in a poem in a foreign language. The Bellamy canvas was in no unknown language, but in the speech used for the daily order to the grocer; nor was it in the least unfinished. It came finally to seem to me as literal and bald a statement of fact as a time-table.