“I can’t help thinking,” said Tarlyon, “that you did Madam Tussaud’s the same afternoon....”
“If you want to know, it was the Tower, St. Paul’s, and the National Gallery that I did on the same afternoon. My mother took me.”
“Of course, I can’t compete with your mother,” said Tarlyon; “but I will take you—now. Waiter—the bill, please.”
It was a day in July, and we were sitting over luncheon at the Café Royal. It was very warm for the time of the year. I don’t know if I have mentioned it, but I am something in the City. There was, if you remember, a slump in the City in the summer of 1922. I was in that slump. And so, with one thing and another, I sighed....
“Come on,” said Tarlyon firmly. “One must not neglect art. And two certainly mustn’t.” Poor, silly man!
We walked from the Café Royal to Trafalgar Square, which is an untidy walk on a glaring afternoon in July. And then we walked about the Gallery; we looked at paintings with that rapt look which can see All Round and Into a thing; and we stood before “Musidora Bathing Her Feet.”
“What a masterpiece,” Tarlyon sighed, “if only she hadn’t got three legs!” I could not at first see Musidora’s third leg, but after he had pointed it out to me I could see nothing else but that ghostly third leg dangling over her knee between the other two.
“You see,” he explained, “Gainsborough painted one leg badly, and so he painted it out and fitted another—but Musidora’s third leg came back. Say what you like, there is something displeasing about a woman with an exaggerated number of legs, though some people rather like that kind of thing, saying that a woman can’t have too many....”
It was as we turned away, talking loftily about legs, that we were confronted by a tall and dark young man.
“Sir,” he addressed Tarlyon, “I would be obliged if you would tell me in which gallery hang the pictures by Manet?”