“Really, my dear Mrs. Warmister, you couldn’t take that back with you. It would be positively wicked to hang it. We know it isn’t a Vandyke, don’t we, Erard?”
Pity, Mr. Anthon mused, that Erard should be thrown into her hands. She looked so—cheap. Mrs. Warmister’s face wore a perpetual grimace. She had been told that her power lay in expression, and consequently she had cultivated a distressingly perpetual mobility.
“Don’t let her do it, Erard,” the heavy young man pleaded with pathetic intensity. “Think what it means for our reputation as connoisseurs.”
“Well!” Mrs. Warmister rose, laughing nervously. “Whatever Mr. Erard decides, I suppose I shall do. I am in his hands.” Then she departed, taking the urgent Mr. Salters with her.
“Two idiots gone,” Erard sighed. “Salters is a New York man, a nobody with money, who has been over here a dozen years trying to learn something about fine-art. He knows a lot of people and gives dinners. One has to tolerate the ass—he brings in game. The woman might know something; but she is crazy for réclame. They say she hires the Paris Herald to publish a paragraph about her once a week, no matter how scandalous. She turns up about every year, and I have to take her around. She buys whatever I tell her to.”
While Erard flung out these biographical items, he was arranging photographs on a large rack that stood like a desk in one corner of the room, where the best daylight reached it.
“These are the things at Madrid,” he explained casually. “Half these Goyas must be spurious. He is an intricate person, though.”
Sebastian Anthon glanced at the photographs nervously. “I am afraid I shan’t be able to take the Spanish trip. My sister-in-law has her mind made up on Rome and then some watering-places, and I am over here this time for her and my niece.”
Although Erard made no sign, his hands came to a pause. Mr. Anthon began again, sighing. “I came over to have a general talk, Erard.”
The young man turned from the rack and motioned his visitor to a chair.