CHAPTER IX. SHOW SUNDAY.
La science l'avait gardé naïf.
Alphonse Daudet.
The last Sunday in March was Show Sunday; and Frank, who was of a festive disposition, had invited all the people he knew in London to inspect his pictures and Mr. Oakley's before they were sent in to the Royal Academy.
Mr. Oakley was a middle-aged Bohemian, who had made a small success in his youth and never got beyond it. It had been enough, however, to launch him into the artistic world, and it was probably only owing to the countenance of his brothers of the brush that he was able to sell his pictures at all. Oakley was an accepted fact, if nothing more; the critics treated him with respect if without enthusiasm; the exhibition committees hung him, though not indeed on the line, and the public bought his pictures, which had the advantage of being moderate in price and signed with a name that everybody knew.
Of course this indifferent child of the earth had a wife and family; and he had been only too glad to share his studio expenses with young Jermyn, whose father, the Cornish clergyman, had been a friend of his own youth.