"Hold on a minute," I said. "Just listen to this delicious epistle from
Uncle Ezra."
"'… We have hoped that you would arrive in Venice before we break up our charming home here. Mary has written you that Professor Painter has joined us at the Palazzo Palladio, complementing our needs and completing our circle. He has an excellent influence for seriousness upon Maud; his fine, manly qualities have come out. Venice, after two years of Berlin, has opened his soul in a really remarkable manner. All the beauty lying loose around here has been a revelation to him—'"
"Maud's beauty," my wife interpreted.
"'And our treasures you will enjoy so much—such dashes of color, such great slaps of light! I was the first to buy—they call it a Savoldo, but I think no third-rate man could be capable of so much—such reaching out after infinity. However, that makes little difference. I would not part with it, now that I have lived these weeks with so fine a thing. Maud won a prize in her Bonifazio, which she bought under my advice. Then Augustus secured the third one, a Bissola, and it has had the greatest influence upon him already; it has given him his education in art. He sits with it by the hour while he is at work, and its charm has gradually produced a revolution in his character. We had always found him too Germanic, and he had immured himself in that barbarous country for so long over his Semitic books that his nature was stunted on one side. His picture has opened a new world for him. Your Aunt Mary and I already see the difference in his character; he is gentler, less narrowly interested in the world. This precious bit of fine art has been worth its price many times, but I don't think Augustus would part with it for any consideration now that he has lived with it and learned to know its power.'"
"I can't see why he is coming to Rome," Watkins commented at the end. "If they are confident that they know all about their pictures, and don't care anyway who did them, and are having all this spiritual love-feast, what in the world do they want any expert criticism of their text for? Now for such people to buy pictures, when they haven't a mint of money! Why don't they buy something within their means really fine—a coin, a Van Dyck print? I could get your uncle a Whistler etching for twenty-five pounds; a really fine thing, you know—"
This was Watkins's hobby.
"Oh, well, it won't be bad in the end of the hall at New York; it's as dark as pitch there; and then Uncle Ezra can leave it to the Metropolitan as a Giorgione. It will give the critics something to do. And I suppose that in coming on here he has in mind to get an indorsement for his picture that will give it a commercial value. He's canny, is my Uncle Ezra, and he likes to gamble too, like the rest of us. If he should draw a prize, it wouldn't be a bad thing to brag of."
Watkins called again the next morning.
"Have you seen Uncle Ezra?" my wife asked, anxiously.
"No. Three telegrams. Train was delayed—I suppose by the importance of the works of art it's bringing on."