Then memory suddenly turned her flashlight on the thing, and told him why it seemed familiar. Three years before, on the eve of sailing for the Front, he had visited Anthony, and the two had inspired the boys and girls of the artist colony to organize a “Faker Show” for the benefit of the French wounded; children, models, and even the artists themselves had vied with each other in producing caricatured art. The most wildly acclaimed piece had been this very panel, painted in a joyous hour by Anthony’s studio-boy, Pietro, from Anthony’s model, Amouretta McGowan; to save time, he had used one of his master’s discarded portrait-studies, and he had kept the characteristic Anthony composition throughout. It was meant for a portrait, one saw,—the portrait of a woman, a hussy, if you like, with dusky flesh-tints after Gauguin, and with an impudent gown patterned and colored like that in Matisse’s once celebrated “Madras Rouge.” But the pearls with which the minx was crowned and girdled, draped and festooned,—ah, the pearls were surely a fling at Maurice Price himself, “the Price-of-Great-Pearls,” as the League students called him, just as in other days they had called Kenyon Cox, “Bunion Socks,” George de Forest Brush, “Young-Man-Afraid-of-his-Brushes,” and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, “Gaudy Saint August”; youthful pleasantries which harmed no one, least of all the artists themselves. Once again Maurice laughed aloud as he recalled how earnestly he had explained to his students his method in painting pearls, telling them of the many slow and careful studies he had made of pearls before he had really mastered the mystery of pearls, and much else, after the manner of enthusiastic and self-giving teachers the world over. In general, the youngsters had listened and profited; otherwise, they would have been donkeys. Also, they had jeered and jested; otherwise, Maurice thought, they would have been prigs. And that nickname, “the Price-of-Great-Pearls,” had clung to him, in a heart-warming way. He felt that if his students had given him no title at all, he would have suffered some vague loneliness of spirit when among them. Astonishing how Pietro, in one piece of brilliant painting, had succeeded in poking fun at two Frenchmen and two Americans! Certainly, Anthony’s well-studied devil-may-care composition showed doubly riotous after that boy had wreaked his genius on it; and the pearls, as Maurice saw with a twinge of gratification, were exquisitely painted, if you considered them as giant opalescent lamps filched from some moonlit fairyland, and not as gems discreetly adorning a woman. And then the Gauguin coloring, the Matisse arabesques! As a final flourish, like the “I thank you” after a four-minute speech, Pietro had signed the work “the Price-of-Great-Pearls.” Maurice found, on looking for that signature, that some later jester had obliterated from it all but the one word, “Price.” Price, indeed!