The customer held up his hand, shook his head. “No, no. Nothing modern for me,” he declared, in his pleasant northern English. “I want real pictures, old pictures. Rembrandt and Sir Joshua Reynolds and that sort of thing.”
“Perfectly.” Mr. Bigger nodded. “Old Masters. Oh, of course we deal in the old as well as the modern.”
“The fact is,” said the other, “that I’ve just bought a rather large house—a Manor House,” he added, in impressive tones.
Mr. Bigger smiled; there was an ingenuousness about this simple-minded fellow which was most engaging. He wondered how the man had made his money. “A Manor House.” The way he had said it was really charming. Here was a man who had worked his way up from serfdom to the lordship of a manor, from the broad base of the feudal pyramid to the narrow summit. His own history and all the history of classes had been implicit in that awed proud emphasis on the “Manor.” But the stranger was running on; Mr. Bigger could not allow his thoughts to wander farther. “In a house of this style,” he was saying, “and with a position like mine to keep up, one must have a few pictures. Old Masters, you know; Rembrandts and What’s-his-names.”
“Of course,” said Mr. Bigger, “an Old Master is a symbol of social superiority.”
“That’s just it,” cried the other, beaming; “you’ve said just what I wanted to say.”
Mr. Bigger bowed and smiled. It was delightful to find some one who took one’s little ironies as sober seriousness.
“Of course, we should only need Old Masters downstairs, in the reception-room. It would be too much of a good thing to have them in the bedrooms too.”
“Altogether too much of a good thing,” Mr. Bigger assented.
“As a matter of fact,” the Lord of the Manor went on, “my daughter—she does a bit of sketching. And very pretty it is. I’m having some of her things framed to hang in the bedrooms. It’s useful having an artist in the family. Saves you buying pictures. But, of course, we must have something old downstairs.”