He ate very little breakfast, and immediately afterward rushed upstairs, made his bed, and lay on it gloating over the precious books, picking up first one volume and then the other, hardly reading them, and beginning already to compose his review based on Professor Smallman's dislike of the translator. Then he began to wonder how much he would be paid for it--one, two, four, five guineas. The editor of the _Post_ was a very rich man. Would they print his name? Presently his happiness was so intense that he could not bear not to share it, and he went downstairs. His mother had gone out. His father was in the dining-room painting. He had the lid of a cigar box and was covering it with a copy of a nude reproduced in some magazine from a picture in the Paris Salon of that year. René watched him. He worked with minute strokes of the brush, caressingly, carefully. Already he had painted several copies of the same picture. "Why do you always paint the same thing?" asked René. "Nothing else worth painting." Mr. Fourmy stopped, looked up at his son, winked, and hissed like a goose in a peculiar mocking laughter he affected when he was most roguish. "She's a beauty, this one. Like to have seen the original. Women. Not much else men care about, as you'll find presently. I can sell as many of these as I care to paint. I'm going to do her smaller though, so's she can be carried in the waistcoat pocket or a letter-case. I've got a watchmaker's glass, so's I can see what I'm doing with the brush." And he took out the glass and screwed it into his eye and looked chuckling up at René. He was absurdly, childishly pleased with himself. "Does mother know?" asked René, all his elation oozing away. "She don't know I sell 'em. I didn't know I could myself. Never saw what's been under my nose all my life. But he's a clever man, is your father, much too clever to be a burden on his wife and family. Knock him down one day and he's up the next." René said heavily: "It's like the shops in the Derby Road where they sell the photographs and the dirty books." Mr. Fourmy waved his hand airily: "This, my boy, is art, hand-painted in oils. Put a gilt frame round it and it's quite respectable. These swine think art is a bawdy thing." "Where do you sell them? To a shop?" "No. To the gentlemen at the Denmark, the churchwardens and chapelgoers." René sat dejectedly looking into the fire. At last he said: "I wish you hadn't told me. It doesn't seem worth while doing anything."