However, Mr. Brooke was holding out bravely; I’ll say that for him. He had had previous experience in making bronze portraits of dear women’s dead fathers. He well knew that the odds were bitterly against any artist who should pledge himself to show forth Father, in his era of prosperity, just by imagining all things from a dim, lean profile of Father in his salad days. In short, according to Mr. Brooke, we were now in the nineteen-twenties; and back in the nineteen-tens, he had taken an oath, had Mr. Brooke, never again to interpret for the world, by means of the willing clay, just how a great man who died in the eighteen-eighties really looked in the eighteen-seventies, when all there was to go by was a wraithlike, looking-glassy daguerreotype of the eighteen-sixties. Yes, Madam, no matter how elegant the crimson velvet brocade that lined the little leather case! The old lady of Highcourt had plenty to say in answer to that; but long before she had begun to say it, the culprit Raymond, stricken by the lightning of his own genius, had fled away, away on sandalled feet, to hide behind the tomato plants and the tall corn. A great persuader, Madam Randolph! She refused to see herself as beaten. “I don’t ask you to promise me anything to-day. I only ask you to give this matter your prayerful consideration. And wouldn’t it be rather criminal on your part if you, a strong man, should allow me, a weak old lady, to degrade our American art by giving this commission to some one else, who would no doubt make a bigger mess of it than you will? Mr. Brooke, you don’t know how much I want to leave behind me, for those grandsons of mine, at least some inkling of what my honored father looked like in Civil War days!” They were stepping into the studio. It was a high step, but the old lady was a high-stepper, and Mr. Brooke chuckled over her disdain of his helping hand. Suddenly his smile vanished. A look of incredulous horror engulfed it utterly. His precious handiwork had been profaned, Southern womanhood insulted! “Good God, what devil has been here?” He himself groaned aloud the shameful answer, “That devil Raymond!” It is hard to find a really neat thing to say at such moments; luckily actions speak louder than words. In wrathful haste, the sculptor strode forward to kick away Raymond’s box, and to tear off those bits of clay foully misplaced on the portrait of a lady.