critics to declare, I foresaw, that the plan was a thing to be more
thankful for than the structure to have been reared on it. My
impatience for the structure, none the less, grew and grew with the
interruptions. He had on coming up to town begun to sit for his
portrait to a young painter, Mr. Rumble, whose little game, as we
also used to say at Mr. Pinhorn's, was to be the first to perch on
the shoulders of renown. Mr. Rumble's studio was a circus in which
the man of the hour, and still more the woman, leaped through the
hoops of his showy frames almost as electrically as they burst into
telegrams and "specials." He pranced into the exhibitions on their
back; he was the reporter on canvas, the Vandyke up to date, and
there was one roaring year in which Mrs. Bounder and Miss Braby,
Guy Walsingham and Dora Forbes proclaimed in chorus from the same
pictured walls that no one had yet got ahead of him.

Paraday had been promptly caught and saddled, accepting with
characteristic good-humour his confidential hint that to figure in
his show was not so much a consequence as a cause of immortality.
From Mrs. Wimbush to the last "representative" who called to
ascertain his twelve favourite dishes, it was the same ingenuous
assumption that he would rejoice in the repercussion. There were
moments when I fancied I might have had more patience with them if
they hadn't been so fatally benevolent. I hated at all events Mr.
Rumble's picture, and had my bottled resentment ready when, later
on, I found my distracted friend had been stuffed by Mrs. Wimbush
into the mouth of another cannon. A young artist in whom she was
intensely interested, and who had no connexion with Mr. Rumble, was
to show how far he could make him go. Poor Paraday, in return, was
naturally to write something somewhere about the young artist. She
played her victims against each other with admirable ingenuity, and