Mr. Van Busche Taylor was a very thin man with a large, bald head, bony and shining; and under the great dome of his skull his face, yellow, with deep lines in it, looked very small. He was quiet and exceedingly polite. He spoke with the accent of New England, and there was about his demeanour a bloodless frigidity which made me ask myself why on earth he was busying himself with Charles Strickland. I had been slightly tickled at the gentleness which Mrs. Strickland put into her mention of her husband’s name, and while the pair conversed I took stock of the room in which we sat. Mrs. Strickland had moved with the times. Gone were the Morris papers and gone the severe cretonnes, gone were the Arundel prints that had adorned the walls of her drawing-room in Ashley Gardens; the room blazed with fantastic colour, and I wondered if she knew that those varied hues, which fashion had imposed upon her, were due to the dreams of a poor painter in a South Sea island. She gave me the answer herself. “What wonderful cushions you have,” said Mr. Van Busche Taylor. “Do you like them?” she said, smiling. “Bakst, you know.” And yet on the walls were coloured reproductions of several of Strickland’s best pictures, due to the enterprise of a publisher in Berlin. “You’re looking at my pictures,” she said, following my eyes. “Of course, the originals are out of my reach, but it’s a comfort to have these. The publisher sent them to me himself. They’re a great consolation to me.” “They must be very pleasant to live with,” said Mr. Van Busche Taylor. “Yes; they’re so essentially decorative.” “That is one of my profoundest convictions,” said Mr. Van Busche Taylor. “Great art is always decorative.” Their eyes rested on a nude woman suckling a baby, while a girl was kneeling by their side holding out a flower to the indifferent child. Looking over them was a wrinkled, scraggy hag. It was Strickland’s version of the Holy Family. I suspected that for the figures had sat his household above Taravao, and the woman and the baby were Ata and his first son. I asked myself if Mrs. Strickland had any inkling of the facts. The conversation proceeded, and I marvelled at the tact with which Mr. Van Busche Taylor avoided all subjects that might have been in the least embarrassing, and at the ingenuity with which Mrs. Strickland, without saying a word that was untrue, insinuated that her relations with her husband had always been perfect. At last Mr. Van Busche Taylor rose to go. Holding his hostess’ hand, he made her a graceful, though perhaps too elaborate, speech of thanks, and left us. “I hope he didn’t bore you,” she said, when the door closed behind him. “Of course it’s a nuisance sometimes, but I feel it’s only right to give people any information I can about Charlie. There’s a certain responsibility about having been the wife of a genius.”