“Exactly. And I want to repay some of her kindness. For she is real good to me. Of course, I don’t pretend to judge ’em for myself. All I have to do is to praise ’em to Auntie. I can’t lay it on too thick for her. It was a big job at Petersburg, you bet.”
“Why at Petersburg?”
“Because there’s such an awful lot of the old masters there—the real, genuine things. I must have seen sixty or seventy Rubenses at the Hermitage; and about an acre of Rembrandts, and, as for the Van Dycks, they made me sick. Do you know,” he continued, speaking low, as if imparting a great secret, “that a man can get to hate Murillo, if he sees enough of him?”
I replied that I could understand his feelings of satiety. “The full soul loatheth the honey-comb,” etc.
“I forgot to say that the old fellow I loathe most of all is Botticelli. And he’s the very one Auntie is craziest about. She has collected all the photographs of his pictures she could get in America and I am adding to the stock all I can pick up in Europe.”
“But there are not many Botticellis in the world. At least, I find them scarce. That old fellow, as you call him, can not trouble you very much.”
“That’s it,” said Manayunk. “It’s the scarcity of Botticellis that gives me the bother. You see Auntie told me not to miss a Botticelli on any account. I have to look over all the pictures for the names of the artists to be sure I don’t skip him. At first I trusted to the printed catalogue, but some of ’em are old and not corrected up to date; and then, again, the pictures are changed about, and the numbers get mixed.”
“You are conscientious at any rate, and do not neglect your aunt’s commission.”
“Yes. She is very much pleased, she writes me, and thinks I’m becoming a good judge of the old masters. That’s because I puff ’em so, I suppose. But I tell you, I’m right glad of a rest here. All I really had to see in Moscow was the Kremlin and the big bell. I’ve seen the bell, but isn’t it strange I can’t find the Kremlin?”
“Can’t find the Kremlin?” I echoed, in amazement.