"Here's an old picture by some Italian gink—impossible to tell by whom it was painted, but not difficult to assign it to a certain date and school.... See what I'm doing, Ledwith?
"That's what we call 'rabbit glue' because it's made out of rabbits' bones—or that's the belief, anyway. It's gilder's glue.
"Now I dissolve this much of it in hot water—then I glue over the face of the picture three layers of tissue-paper, one on top of the other—so!
"Now here is a new chassis or stretcher over which I have stretched a new linen canvas. Yesterday I sponged it as a tailor sponges cloth; and now it's dry and tight.
"Now I'm going to reline this battered old Italian canvas. It's already been relined—perhaps a hundred years ago. So first I take off the old relining canvas—with hot water—this way—cleaning off all the old paste or glue from it with alcohol....
"Now here's a pot of paste in which there is also glue and whitening; and I spread it over the back of this old painting, and then, very gingerly, glue it over the new linen canvas on the stretcher.
"Now I smooth it with this polished wooden block, and then—just watch me do laundry work!"
He picked up a flat-iron which was moderately warm, reversed the relined picture on a marble slab, and began to iron it out with the skill and precaution of an expert laundress doing frills.
Ledwith looked on with a sort of tremulously fixed interest.
"In three days," said Quarren, laying the plastered picture away, "I'll soak off that tissue paper with warm water. I have to keep it on, you see, so that no flakes of paint shall escape from the painting and no air get in to blister the surface."