They were at the door, Jack in wistful insistence, hungry for their companionship, and the Doge and Mary in common hesitancy for a phrase before parting from him. He was ahead of the phrase.
"But there is a Velasquez, one of the greatest of Velasquezes, just a few steps from here! It would take only a minute to see it."
"A Velasquez a few steps from here!" cried the Doge. "Where? Be exact, before I let my hopes rise too high."
"The subject is an ancestor of mine. My father has it."
Jack had looked in the direction of the Wingfield house on the Madison Avenue corner as he spoke, and the Doge had followed his glance. The eagerness passed from the Doge's face, but not its intensity. That was transmuted into something staring and hard.
"A very great Velasquez!" Jack repeated.
"My amour propre!" the Doge said, in whispered abstraction, using the French which so exactly expresses the rightness of an inner feeling that will not let one do a thing however much he may wish to. Then a wave of confusion passed over his face, evidently at the echo of his thoughts in the form of words come unwittingly from his lips. He tried to retrieve his exclamation in an effort at the forensic: "The amour propre of any American is hurt by the thought that he must go to a private gallery to see a Velasquez in the greatest city of the land!"
But it was a lame explanation. Clearly, some old antipathy had been aroused in Jasper Ewold; and it made him hesitate to enter the big red brick house on the corner.
"And we have a wonderful Sargent, too, a Sargent of my mother!" Jack proceeded.
"Yes, yes!" said the Doge, and eagerness returned; a strange, moving eagerness that seemed to come from the same depths as the exclamation that had arrested his acceptance of the invitation at the outset. It held the monosyllables like drops of water trembling before they fell.