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Such was naturally the moral of Mrs Mallow’s question: if their wealth was to be assumed, it was clear, from the nature of their admiration, as well as from mysterious hints thrown out (they were a little odd!) as to other possibilities of the same mortuary sort, what their further patronage might be; and not less evident that should the Master become at all known in those climes nothing would be more inevitable than a run of Canadian custom. Peter had been present before at runs of custom, colonial and domestic–present at each of those of which the aggregation had left so few gaps in the marble company round him; but it was his habit never at these junctures to prick the bubble in advance. The fond illusion, while it lasted, eased the wound of elections never won, the long ache of medals and diplomas carried off, on every chance, by everyone but the Master; it moreover lighted the lamp that would glimmer through the next eclipse. They lived, however, after all–as it was always beautiful to see–at a height scarce susceptible of ups and downs. They strained a point at times charmingly, strained it to admit that the public was here and there not too bad to buy; but they would have been nowhere without their attitude that the Master was always too good to sell. They were at all events deliciously formed, Peter often said to himself, for their fate; the Master had a vanity, his wife had a loyalty, of which success, depriving these things of innocence, would have diminished the merit and the grace. Anyone could be charming under a charm, and as he looked about him at a world of prosperity more void of proportion even than the Master’s museum he wondered if he knew another pair that so completely escaped vulgarity.

‘What a pity Lance isn’t with us to rejoice!’ Mrs Mallow on this occasion sighed at supper.

‘We’ll drink to the health of the absent,’ her husband replied, filling his friend’s glass and his own and giving a drop to their companion; ‘but we must hope he’s preparing himself for a happiness much less like this of ours this evening–excusable as I grant it to be!–than like the comfort we have always (whatever has happened or has not happened) been able to trust ourselves to enjoy. The comfort,’ the Master explained, leaning back in the pleasant lamplight and firelight, holding up his glass and looking round at his marble family, quartered more or less, a monstrous brood, in every room–‘the comfort of art in itself!’

Peter looked a little shyly at his wine. ‘Well–I don’t care what you may call it when a fellow doesn’t–but Lance must learn to sell, you know. I drink to his acquisition of the secret of a base popularity!’

‘Oh yes, he must sell,’ the boy’s mother, who was still more, however, this seemed to give out, the Master’s wife, rather artlessly allowed.

‘Ah,’ the sculptor after a moment confidently pronounced, ‘Lance will. Don’t be afraid. He’ll have learnt.’

‘Which is exactly what Peter,’ Mrs Mallow gaily returned–‘why in the world were you so perverse, Peter?–wouldn’t, when he told him, hear of.’

Peter, when this lady looked at him with accusatory affection–a grace on her part not infrequent–could never find a word; but the Master, who was always all amenity and tact, helped him out now as he had often helped him before. ‘That’s his old idea, you know–on which we’ve so often differed: his theory that the artist should be all impulse and instinct. I go in of course for a certain amount of school. Not too much–but a due proportion. There’s where his protest came in,’ he continued to explain to his wife, ‘as against what might, don’t you see? be in question for Lance.’

‘Ah well’–and Mrs Mallow turned the violet eyes across the table at the subject of this discourse–‘he’s sure to have meant of course nothing but good. Only that wouldn’t have prevented him, if Lance had taken his advice, from being in effect horribly cruel.’