“Your fiancée? My dear old lad, I didn’t know you were engaged. Who is she? Do I know her?”
“Her name is Alice Wigmore. You don’t know her.”
“And she painted that picture?” Archie was perturbed. “But, I say! Won’t she be apt to wonder where the thing has got to?”
“I told her it had been stolen. She thought it a great compliment, and was tickled to death. So that’s all right.”
“And, of course, she’ll paint you another.”
“Not while I have my strength she won’t,” said J. B. Wheeler firmly. “She’s given up painting since I taught her golf, thank goodness, and my best efforts shall be employed in seeing that she doesn’t have a relapse.”
“But, laddie,” said Archie, puzzled, “you talk as though there were something wrong with the picture. I thought it dashed hot stuff.”
“God bless you!” said J. B. Wheeler.
Archie proceeded on his way, still mystified. Then he reflected that artists as a class were all pretty weird and rummy and talked more or less consistently through their hats. You couldn’t ever take an artist’s opinion on a picture. Nine out of ten of them had views on Art which would have admitted them to any looney-bin, and no questions asked. He had met several of the species who absolutely raved over things which any reasonable chappie would decline to be found dead in a ditch with. His admiration for the Wigmore Venus, which had faltered for a moment during his conversation with J. B. Wheeler, returned in all its pristine vigour. Absolute rot, he meant to say, to try to make out that it wasn’t one of the ones and just like mother used to make. Look how Lucille had liked it!
At breakfast next morning, Archie once more brought up the question of the hanging of the picture. It was absurd to let a thing like that go on wasting its sweetness behind a sofa with its face to the wall.