"Ah--I didn't know you even knew the Strouds. He was such an inflexible
hermit."
"I didn't--till after.... She sent for me to paint him when he was
dead."
"When he was dead? You?"
I must have let a little too much amazement escape through my surprise,
for he answered with a deprecating laugh: "Yes--she's an awful
simpleton, you know, Mrs. Stroud. Her only idea was to have him done by
a fashionable painter--ah, poor Stroud! She thought it the surest way
of proclaiming his greatness--of forcing it on a purblind public. And
at the moment I was _the_ fashionable painter."
"Ah, poor Stroud--as you say. Was _that_ his history?"
"That was his history. She believed in him, gloried in him--or thought
she did. But she couldn't bear not to have all the drawing-rooms with
her. She couldn't bear the fact that, on varnishing days, one could
always get near enough to see his pictures. Poor woman! She's just a
fragment groping for other fragments. Stroud is the only whole I ever
knew."
"You ever knew? But you just said--"
Gisburn had a curious smile in his eyes.
"Oh, I knew him, and he knew me--only it happened after he was dead."