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After breakfast my wife cooked up some engagement, and hurried me off. We left Uncle Ezra in the hands of the physician. Two hours later, when we entered, the operation had been performed–we could see at a glance–and in a bloody fashion. The pictures were lying about the vast room as if they had been spat at. Uncle Ezra smiled wanly at us, with the courage of the patient who is a sceptic about physicians.

“Just what I expected,” he said, briskly, to relieve Watkins, who was smoking, with the air of a man who has finished his job and is now cooling off. “Mr. Watkins thinks Painter’s picture and Maud’s are copies, Painter’s done a few years ago and Maud’s a little older, the last century. My Savoldo he finds older, but repainted. You said cinque cento, Mr. Watkins?”

“Perhaps, Mr. Williams,” Watkins answered, and added, much as a dog would give a final shake to the bird, “Much repainted, hardly anything left of the original. There may be a Savoldo underneath, but you don’t see it.” Watkins smiled at us knowingly. My wife snubbed him.

“Of course, Uncle Ezra, that’s one man’s opinion. I certainly should not put much faith in one critic, no matter how eminent he may be. Just look at the guide-books and see how the ‘authorities’ swear at one another. Ruskin says every man is a fool who can’t appreciate his particular love, and Burckhardt calls it a daub, and Eastlake insipid. Now, there are a set of young fellows who think they know all about paint and who painted what. They’re renaming all the great masterpieces. Pretty soon they will discover that some tenth-rate fellow painted the Sistine Chapel.”

Watkins put on an aggrieved and expostulatory manner. Uncle Ezra cut in.

“Oh! my dear! Mr. Watkins may be right, quite right. It’s his business to know, I am sure, and I anticipated all that he would say; indeed, I have come off rather better than I expected. There is old paint in it somewhere.”

“Pretty far down,” Watkins muttered. My wife bristled up, but Uncle Ezra assumed his most superb calm.

“It makes no difference to me, of course, as far as the worth of the work of art is concerned. I made up my mind before I came here that my picture was worth a great deal to me, much more than I paid for it.” There was a heroic gasp. Watkins interposed mercilessly, “And may I ask, Mr. Williams, what you did give for it?”

Uncle Ezra was an honest man. “Twenty-five hundred lire,” he replied, sullenly.

“Excuse me” (Watkins was behaving like a pitiless cad), “but you paid a great deal too much for it, I assure you. I could have got it for—-“

“Mr. Watkins,” my wife was hardly civil to him, “it doesn’t matter much what you could have got it for.”

“No,” Uncle Ezra went on bravely, “I am a little troubled as to what this may mean to Maud and Professor Painter, for you see their pictures are copies.”

“Undoubted modern copies,” the unquenchable Watkins emended.

“Maud has learned a great deal from her picture. And as for Painter, it has been an education in art, an education in life. He said to me the night before I came away, ‘Mr. Williams, I wouldn’t take two thousand for that picture; it’s been the greatest influence in my life.'”

I thought Watkins would have convulsions.

“And it has brought those two young souls together in a marvellous way, this common interest in fine art. You will find Maud a much more serious person, Jane. No, if I were Painter I certainly should not care a fig whether it proves to be a copy or not. I shouldn’t let that influence me in my love for such an educational wonder.”

The bluff was really sublime, but painful. My wife gave a decided hint to Watkins that his presence in such a family scene was awkward. He took his hat and cane. Uncle Ezra rose and grasped him cordially by the hand.