"Ah—I didn't know you even knew the Strouds. He was such an inflexible hermit."
"I didn't—till after.... She sent for me to paint him when he was dead."
"When he was dead? You?"
I must have let a little too much amazement escape through my surprise, for he answered with a deprecating laugh: "Yes—she's an awful simpleton, you know, Mrs. Stroud. Her only idea was to have him done by a fashionable painter—ah, poor Stroud! She thought it the surest way of proclaiming his greatness—of forcing it on a purblind public. And at the moment I was the fashionable painter."
"Ah, poor Stroud—as you say. Was that his history?"
"That was his history. She believed in him, gloried in him—or thought she did. But she couldn't bear not to have all the drawing-rooms with her. She couldn't bear the fact that, on varnishing days, one could always get near enough to see his pictures. Poor woman! She's just a fragment groping for other fragments. Stroud is the only whole I ever knew."
"You ever knew? But you just said—"
Gisburn had a curious smile in his eyes.
"Oh, I knew him, and he knew me—only it happened after he was dead."
I dropped my voice instinctively. "When she sent for you?"