Much American newspaper puffery of Americans abroad is sheer invention, designed to give us at home the pleasing notion that _we_ are capturing the earth. But this notice of Roger Wade’s career had truth in it. He was doing extraordinarily well for so young a man. His sense of color and form was lifted toward genius by imagination and originality. His ability had no handicap of cheap and petty--and glaring--eccentricity, such as so often enters into the composition of an original and boldly imaginative temperament to mar its achievement and to retard the recognition of its merit. Thus he speedily made a notable place for himself. He could count on disposing of enough pictures to bring him in fifteen to twenty thousand francs a year; and that sum was about as much as he, simple of tastes, single-hearted in devotion to his work and indifferent to pose and pretense, could find time and opportunity to spend. He knew that in a few years far more money than he needed would be forced upon him--a prospect which he had the good sense to view with distrust when he thought of it at all. About the only thing that had stood in his way was his personal appearance. As one of his friends--Berthier, whose panels will be admired so long as the pale, mysterious glories of their elusive colors persist--said in a confidential moment: “Roger, you look so much like a man of genius that it’s hard to believe you are the real thing.” Big is the word most nearly expressing that unusual appearance of his. He was tall and broad and powerful. His features were large, bold, handsome. The dark coloring of skin and hair and eyes added to the impression of bigness. It was in part a matter of real size, but only in part. Not the most casual glance could have reported a judgment of mere bulk. He seemed big because his countenance, his whole body, seemed an effort of Nature adequately to express a big nature. Herbert Spencer uttered about the most superb compliment one human being ever paid another when he said of George Eliot that she suggested “a large intelligence moving freely.” There was in Roger Wade this quality of the great bird high in the blue ether above the grime and littleness of conventional life. His looks had caused him more than a little trouble--of which he was not in the least aware. For a large part of his charm lay in his childlike unconsciousness of himself--a trait less rare in painters and sculptors than in any other class of men of genius, probably because their work compels them to concentrate constantly upon persons and things external and in no way related to their own ego. Had Roger been physically vain, beyond doubt his good looks would have ruined him. The envy of men and the infatuation of women would have made escape impossible. As it was, he did his work, ignored his enemies, and neither enslaved nor was enslaved by such women as drifted into his life--and out again. It is fortunate for