This suggestion was a happy one, and had been put into effect. The portraits in question were admirable examples of a very eminent painter of the day, and Henry as large as life, with the unmistakable features of his race, sat smoking his cigar, so natural, on one side of the Italian fireplace, while on the other hung Mrs. Maxwell in her crimson gown with all her diamonds on. Both pictures were diabolically clever, and much more like the sitters than the sitters (happily for them) had any idea: for where Mrs. Maxwell saw only the impressionist blurs of coloured light which indicated her priceless stones, the painter had finely observed and faithfully represented an intolerably ostentatious opulence; where Mr. Maxwell saw only that he was, as usual, smoking a cigar, the painter had seen the man who liked to be painted as doing so. Besides, the glowing end of it, smouldering beneath its white ash, was marvellously indicated, and Mr. Maxwell often declared he could almost catch a whiff of it. Between them hung Anthony, a young man of about twenty-three. He was undoubtedly the son of each of his parents. And the two parents were turned fondly, as in life, towards the hope of the house, and the hope of this house, beautifully dressed, also as in life, stared somewhat vacuously in front of him. It was, in fact, on Anthony, quite as much as on the mounting of the ladder of social distinction, that his mother's ambitions centred, and Anthony, it must be allowed, was largely that which his mother would have him be; but on the great question of the potency of wealth, its being able to get for you, if you spend it properly, anything you wish, from a wife or an ancestor to a pair of shoes, she did not feel certain of his soundness. There were other things, too, about Anthony which puzzled his mother: he was accustomed to read poetry, and appeared to enjoy Wagner, a curious crookedness, so she thought, in one otherwise honest. But both mother and son were agreed that, wherever he got his shoes, he could not do better than get his wife from Andrew Brereton's house, the prospective bride being Maud Brereton, a young goddess of about eighteen years and six feet of wholesome growth, whom her mother invariably alluded to as "my little girl."