Crucial Instances by Edith Wharton

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_Mrs. Dale_. For that very reason.

_Ventnor (deprecatingly)_. You know I didn't mean it for you! And
_my_ first book--do you remember--was dedicated to you.

_Mrs. Dale_. _Silver Trumpets_--

_Ventnor (much interested)_. Have you a copy still, by any chance? The
first edition, I mean? Mine was stolen years ago. Do you think you could
put your hand on it?

_Mrs. Dale (taking a small shabby book from the table at her side)_.
It's here.

_Ventnor (eagerly)_. May I have it? Ah, thanks. This is _very_
interesting. The last copy sold in London for £40, and they tell me the
next will fetch twice as much. It's quite _introuvable_.

_Mrs. Dale_. I know that. _(A pause. She takes the book from him,
opens it, and reads, half to herself--)_

_How much we two have seen together,
Of other eyes unwist,
Dear as in days of leafless weather
The willow's saffron mist,

Strange as the hour when Hesper swings
A-sea in beryl green,
While overhead on dalliant wings
The daylight hangs serene,

And thrilling as a meteor's fall
Through depths of lonely sky,
When each to each two watchers call:
I saw it!--So did I._

_Ventnor_. Thin, thin--the troubadour tinkle. Odd how little promise
there is in first volumes!

_Mrs. Dale (with irresistible emphasis)_. I thought there was a
distinct promise in this!

_Ventnor (seeing his mistake)_. Ah--the one you would never let me
fulfil? _(Sentimentally.)_ How inexorable you were! You never
dedicated a book to _me_.

_Mrs. Dale_. I hadn't begun to write when we were--dedicating things
to each other.

_Ventnor_. Not for the public--but you wrote for me; and, wonderful as
you are, you've never written anything since that I care for half as much
as--

_Mrs. Dale (interested)_. Well?

_Ventnor_. Your letters.

_Mrs. Dale (in a changed voice)_. My letters--do you remember them?

_Ventnor_. When I don't, I reread them.

_Mrs. Dale (incredulous)_. You have them still?

_Ventnor (unguardedly)_. You haven't mine, then?

_Mrs. Dale (playfully)_. Oh, you were a celebrity already. Of course I
kept them! _(Smiling.)_ Think what they are worth now! I always keep
them locked up in my safe over there. _(She indicates a cabinet.)

Ventnor (after a pause)_. I always carry yours with me.

_Mrs. Dale (laughing)_. You--

_Ventnor_. Wherever I go. _(A longer pause. She looks at him
fixedly.)_ I have them with me now.

_Mrs. Dale (agitated)_. You--have them with you--now?

_Ventnor (embarrassed)_. Why not? One never knows--

_Mrs. Dale_. Never knows--?

_Ventnor (humorously)_. Gad--when the bank-examiner may come round.
You forget I'm a married man.

_Mrs. Dale_. Ah--yes.

_Ventnor (sits down beside her)_. I speak to you as I couldn't to
anyone else--without deserving a kicking. You know how it all came about.
_(A pause.)_ You'll bear witness that it wasn't till you denied me all
hope--

_Mrs. Dale (a little breathless)_. Yes, yes--

_Ventnor_. Till you sent me from you--

_Mrs. Dale_. It's so easy to be heroic when one is young! One doesn't
realize how long life is going to last afterward. _(Musing.)_ Nor what
weary work it is gathering up the fragments.

_Ventnor_. But the time comes when one sends for the china-mender, and
has the bits riveted together, and turns the cracked side to the wall--

_Mrs. Dale_. And denies that the article was ever damaged?

_Ventnor_. Eh? Well, the great thing, you see, is to keep one's self
out of reach of the housemaid's brush. _(A pause.)_ If you're married
you can't--always. _(Smiling.)_ Don't you hate to be taken down and
dusted?

_Mrs. Dale (with intention)_. You forget how long ago my husband died.
It's fifteen years since I've been an object of interest to anybody but the
public.

_Ventnor (smiling)_. The only one of your admirers to whom you've ever
given the least encouragement!

_Mrs. Dale_. Say rather the most easily pleased!

_Ventnor_. Or the only one you cared to please?

_Mrs. Dale_. Ah, you _haven't_ kept my letters!

_Ventnor (gravely)_. Is that a challenge? Look here, then! _(He
drams a packet from his pocket and holds it out to her.)_

_Mrs. Dale (taking the packet and looking at him earnestly)_. Why have
you brought me these?

_Ventnor_. I didn't bring them; they came because I came--that's all.
_(Tentatively.)_ Are we unwelcome?

_Mrs. Dale (who has undone the packet and does not appear to hear
him)_. The very first I ever wrote you--the day after we met at the
concert. How on earth did you happen to keep it? _(She glances over
it.)_ How perfectly absurd! Well, it's not a compromising document.

_Ventnor_. I'm afraid none of them are.

_Mrs. Dale (quickly)_. Is it to that they owe their immunity? Because
one could leave them about like safety matches?--Ah, here's another I
remember--I wrote that the day after we went skating together for the first
time. _(She reads it slowly.)_ How odd! How very odd!

_Ventnor_. What?

_Mrs. Dale_. Why, it's the most curious thing--I had a letter of this
kind to do the other day, in the novel I'm at work on now--the letter of a
woman who is just--just beginning--

_Ventnor_. Yes--just beginning--?

_Mrs. Dale_. And, do you know, I find the best phrase in it, the
phrase I somehow regarded as the fruit of--well, of all my subsequent
discoveries--is simply plagiarized, word for word, from this!

_Ventnor (eagerly)_. I told you so! You were all there!

_Mrs. Dale (critically)_. But the rest of it's poorly done--very
poorly. _(Reads the letter over.)_ H'm--I didn't know how to leave
off. It takes me forever to get out of the door.

_Ventnor (gayly)_. Perhaps I was there to prevent you! _(After a
pause.)_ I wonder what I said in return?

_Mrs. Dale (interested)_. Shall we look? _(She rises.)_ Shall
we--really? I have them all here, you know. _(She goes toward the
cabinet.)_

_Ventnor (following her with repressed eagerness)_. Oh--all!

_Mrs. Dale (throws open the door of the cabinet, revealing a number of
packets)_. Don't you believe me now?

_Ventnor_. Good heavens! How I must have repeated myself! But then you
were so very deaf.

_Mrs. Dale (takes out a packet and returns to her seat. Ventnor extends
an impatient hand for the letters)_. No--no; wait! I want to find your
answer to the one I was just reading. _(After a pause.)_ Here it
is--yes, I thought so!

_Ventnor_. What did you think?

_Mrs. Dale (triumphantly)_. I thought it was the one in which you
quoted _Epipsychidion_--

_Ventnor_. Mercy! Did I _quote_ things? I don't wonder you were
cruel.

_Mrs. Dale_. Ah, and here's the other--the one I--the one I didn't
answer--for a long time. Do you remember?

_Ventnor (with emotion)_. Do I remember? I wrote it the morning after
we heard _Isolde_--

_Mrs. Dale (disappointed)_. No--no. _That_ wasn't the one I
didn't answer! Here--this is the one I mean.

_Ventnor (takes it curiously)_. Ah--h'm--this is very like unrolling a
mummy--_(he glances at her)_--with a live grain of wheat in it,
perhaps?--Oh, by Jove!

_Mrs. Dale_. What?

_Ventnor_. Why, this is the one I made a sonnet out of afterward! By
Jove, I'd forgotten where that idea came from. You may know the lines
perhaps? They're in the fourth volume of my Complete Edition--It's the
thing beginning

_Love came to me with unrelenting eyes--_

one of my best, I rather fancy. Of course, here it's very crudely put--the
values aren't brought out--ah! this touch is good though--very good. H'm, I
daresay there might be other material. _(He glances toward the
cabinet.)_

_Mrs. Dale (drily)_. The live grain of wheat, as you said!

_Ventnor_. Ah, well--my first harvest was sown on rocky
ground--_now_ I plant for the fowls of the air. _(Rising and walking
toward the cabinet.)_ When can I come and carry off all this rubbish?

_Mrs. Dale_. Carry it off?

_Ventnor (embarrassed)_. My dear lady, surely between you and me
explicitness is a burden. You must see that these letters of ours can't be
left to take their chance like an ordinary correspondence--you said
yourself we were public property.

_Mrs. Dale_. To take their chance? Do you suppose that, in my keeping,
your letters take any chances? _(Suddenly.)_ Do mine--in yours?

_Ventnor (still more embarrassed)_. Helen--! _(He takes a turn
through the room.)_ You force me to remind you that you and I are
differently situated--that in a moment of madness I sacrificed the only
right you ever gave me--the right to love you better than any other
woman in the world. _(A pause. She says nothing and he continues, with
increasing difficulty--)_ You asked me just now why I carried your
letters about with me--kept them, literally, in my own hands. Well, suppose
it's to be sure of their not falling into some one else's?

_Mrs. Dale_. Oh!

_Ventnor (throws himself into a chair)_. For God's sake don't pity me!

_Mrs. Dale (after a long pause)_. Am I dull--or are you trying to say
that you want to give me back my letters?

_Ventnor (starting up)_. I? Give you back--? God forbid! Your letters?
Not for the world! The only thing I have left! But you can't dream that in
_my_ hands--

_Mrs. Dale (suddenly)_. You want yours, then?

_Ventnor (repressing his eagerness)_. My dear friend, if I'd ever
dreamed that you'd kept them--?

_Mrs. Dale (accusingly)_. You _do_ want them. _(A pause. He
makes a deprecatory gesture.)_ Why should they be less safe with me than
mine with you? _I_ never forfeited the right to keep them.

_Ventnor (after another pause)_. It's compensation enough, almost,
to have you reproach me! _(He moves nearer to her, but she makes no
response.)_ You forget that I've forfeited _all_ my rights--even
that of letting you keep my letters.

_Mrs. Dale_. You _do_ want them! _(She rises, throws all the
letters into the cabinet, locks the door and puts the key in her
pocket.)_ There's my answer.

_Ventnor_. Helen--!

_Mrs. Dale_. Ah, I paid dearly enough for the right to keep them, and
I mean to! _(She turns to him passionately.)_ Have you ever asked
yourself how I paid for it? With what months and years of solitude, what
indifference to flattery, what resistance to affection?--Oh, don't smile
because I said affection, and not love. Affection's a warm cloak in cold
weather; and I _have_ been cold; and I shall keep on growing colder!
Don't talk to me about living in the hearts of my readers! We both know
what kind of a domicile that is. Why, before long I shall become a classic!
Bound in sets and kept on the top book-shelf--brr, doesn't that sound
freezing? I foresee the day when I shall be as lonely as an Etruscan
museum! _(She breaks into a laugh.)_ That's what I've paid for the
right to keep your letters. _(She holds out her hand.)_ And now give
me mine.

_Ventnor_. Yours?

_Mrs. Dale (haughtily)_. Yes; I claim them.

_Ventnor (in the same tone)_. On what ground?

_Mrs. Dale_. Hear the man!--Because I wrote them, of course.

_Ventnor_. But it seems to me that--under your inspiration, I admit--I
also wrote mine.

_Mrs. Dale_. Oh, I don't dispute their authenticity--it's yours I
deny!

_Ventnor_. Mine?

_Mrs. Dale_. You voluntarily ceased to be the man who wrote me those
letters--you've admitted as much. You traded paper for flesh and blood. I
don't dispute your wisdom--only you must hold to your bargain! The letters
are all mine.

_Ventnor (groping between two tones)_. Your arguments are as
convincing as ever. _(He hazards a faint laugh.)_ You're a marvellous
dialectician--but, if we're going to settle the matter in the spirit of an
arbitration treaty, why, there are accepted conventions in such cases. It's
an odious way to put it, but since you won't help me, one of them is--

_Mrs. Dale_. One of them is--?

_Ventnor_. That it is usual--that technically, I mean, the
letter--belongs to its writer--

_Mrs. Dale (after a pause)_. Such letters as _these_?

_Ventnor_. Such letters especially--

_Mrs. Dale_. But you couldn't have written them if I hadn't--been
willing to read them. Surely there's more of myself in them than of you.

_Ventnor_. Surely there's nothing in which a man puts more of himself
than in his love-letters!

_Mrs. Dale (with emotion)_. But a woman's love-letters are like her child.
They belong to her more than to anybody else--

_Ventnor_. And a man's?

_Mrs. Dale (with sudden violence)_. Are all he risks!--There, take
them. _(She flings the key of the cabinet at his feet and sinks into a
chair.)

Ventnor (starts as though to pick up the key; then approaches and bends
over her)_. Helen--oh, Helen!

_Mrs. Dale (she yields her hands to him, murmuring:)_ Paul!
_(Suddenly she straightens herself and draws back illuminated.)_ What
a fool I am! I see it all now. You want them for your memoirs!

_Ventnor (disconcerted)_. Helen--

_Mrs. Dale (agitated)_. Come, come--the rule is to unmask when the
signal's given! You want them for your memoirs.

_Ventnor (with a forced laugh)_. What makes you think so?

_Mrs. Dale (triumphantly)_. Because _I_ want them for mine!

_Ventnor (in a changed tone)_. Ah--. _(He moves away from her and
leans against the mantelpiece. She remains seated, with her eyes fixed on
him.)_

_Mrs. Dale_. I wonder I didn't see it sooner. Your reasons were lame
enough.

_Ventnor (ironically)_. Yours were masterly. You're the more
accomplished actor of the two. I was completely deceived.

_Mrs. Dale_. Oh, I'm a novelist. I can keep up that sort of thing for
five hundred pages!

_Ventnor_. I congratulate you. _(A pause.)_

_Mrs. Dale (moving to her seat behind the tea-table)_. I've never
offered you any tea. _(She bends over the kettle.)_ Why don't you take
your letters?

_Ventnor_. Because you've been clever enough to make it impossible for
me. _(He picks up the key and hands it to her. Then abruptly)_--Was it
all acting--just now?

_Mrs. Dale_. By what right do you ask?

_Ventnor_. By right of renouncing my claim to my letters. Keep
them--and tell me.

_Mrs. Dale_. I give you back your claim--and I refuse to tell you.

_Ventnor (sadly)_. Ah, Helen, if you deceived me, you deceived
yourself also.

_Mrs. Dale_. What does it matter, now that we're both undeceived? I
played a losing game, that's all.

_Ventnor_. Why losing--since all the letters are yours?

_Mrs. Dale_. The letters? _(Slowly.)_ I'd forgotten the letters--

_Ventnor (exultant)_. Ah, I knew you'd end by telling me the truth!

_Mrs. Dale_. The truth? Where _is_ the truth? _(Half to
herself.)_ I thought I was lying when I began--but the lies turned into
truth as I uttered them! _(She looks at Ventnor.)_ I _did_ want
your letters for my memoirs--I _did_ think I'd kept them for that
purpose--and I wanted to get mine back for the same reason--but now _(she
puts out her hand and picks up some of her letters, which are lying
scattered on the table near her)_--how fresh they seem, and how they
take me back to the time when we lived instead of writing about life!

_Ventnor (smiling)_. The time when we didn't prepare our impromptu
effects beforehand and copyright our remarks about the weather!

_Mrs. Dale_. Or keep our epigrams in cold storage and our adjectives
under lock and key!

_Ventnor_. When our emotions weren't worth ten cents a word, and a
signature wasn't an autograph. Ah, Helen, after all, there's nothing like
the exhilaration of spending one's capital!

_Mrs. Dale_. Of wasting it, you mean. _(She points to the
letters.)_ Do you suppose we could have written a word of these if we'd
known we were putting our dreams out at interest? _(She sits musing, with
her eyes on the fire, and he watches her in silence.)_ Paul, do you
remember the deserted garden we sometimes used to walk in?

_Ventnor_. The old garden with the high wall at the end of the village
street? The garden with the ruined box-borders and the broken-down arbor?
Why, I remember every weed in the paths and every patch of moss on the
walls!

_Mrs. Dale._ Well--I went back there the other day. The village is
immensely improved. There's a new hotel with gas-fires, and a trolley in
the main street; and the garden has been turned into a public park, where
excursionists sit on cast-iron benches admiring the statue of an
Abolitionist.

_Ventnor_. An Abolitionist--how appropriate!

_Mrs. Dale_. And the man who sold the garden has made a fortune that
he doesn't know how to spend--

_Ventnor (rising impulsively)_. Helen, _(he approaches and lays his
hand on her letters)_, let's sacrifice our fortune and keep the
excursionists out!

_Mrs. Dale (with a responsive movement)_. Paul, do you really mean it?

_Ventnor (gayly)_. Mean it? Why, I feel like a landed proprietor
already! It's more than a garden--it's a park.

_Mrs. Dale_. It's more than a park, it's a world--as long as we keep
it to ourselves!

_Ventnor_. Ah, yes--even the pyramids look small when one sees a
Cook's tourist on top of them! _(He takes the key from the table, unlocks
the cabinet and brings out his letters, which he lays beside hers.)_
Shall we burn the key to our garden?

_Mrs. Dale_. Ah, then it will indeed be boundless! _(Watching him
while he throws the letters into the fire.)_

_Ventnor (turning back to her with a half-sad smile)_. But not too big
for us to find each other in?

_Mrs. Dale_. Since we shall be the only people there! _(He takes
both her hands and they look at each other a moment in silence. Then he
goes out by the door to the right. As he reaches the door she takes a step
toward him, impulsively; then turning back she leans against the
chimney-piece, quietly watching the letters burn.)_

THE REMBRANDT

"You're _so_ artistic," my cousin Eleanor Copt began.

Of all Eleanor's exordiums it is the one I most dread. When she tells me
I'm so clever I know this is merely the preamble to inviting me to meet the
last literary obscurity of the moment: a trial to be evaded or endured, as
circumstances dictate; whereas her calling me artistic fatally connotes
the request to visit, in her company, some distressed gentlewoman whose
future hangs on my valuation of her old Saxe or of her grandfather's
Marc Antonios. Time was when I attempted to resist these compulsions of
Eleanor's; but I soon learned that, short of actual flight, there was
no refuge from her beneficent despotism. It is not always easy for the
curator of a museum to abandon his post on the plea of escaping a pretty
cousin's importunities; and Eleanor, aware of my predicament, is none
too magnanimous to take advantage of it. Magnanimity is, in fact, not in
Eleanor's line. The virtues, she once explained to me, are like bonnets:
the very ones that look best on other people may not happen to suit one's
own particular style; and she added, with a slight deflection of metaphor,
that none of the ready-made virtues ever _had_ fitted her: they all
pinched somewhere, and she'd given up trying to wear them.

Therefore when she said to me, "You're _so_ artistic." emphasizing the
conjunction with a tap of her dripping umbrella (Eleanor is out in all
weathers: the elements are as powerless against her as man), I merely
stipulated, "It's not old Saxe again?"

She shook her head reassuringly. "A picture--a Rembrandt!"

"Good Lord! Why not a Leonardo?"

"Well"--she smiled--"that, of course, depends on _you_."

"On me?"

"On your attribution. I dare say Mrs. Fontage would consent to the
change--though she's very conservative."

A gleam of hope came to me and I pronounced: "One can't judge of a picture
in this weather."

"Of course not. I'm coming for you to-morrow."

"I've an engagement to-morrow."

"I'll come before or after your engagement."

The afternoon paper lay at my elbow and I contrived a furtive consultation
of the weather-report. It said "Rain to-morrow," and I answered briskly:
"All right, then; come at ten"--rapidly calculating that the clouds on
which I counted might lift by noon.

My ingenuity failed of its due reward; for the heavens, as if in league
with my cousin, emptied themselves before morning, and punctually at ten
Eleanor and the sun appeared together in my office.

I hardly listened, as we descended the Museum steps and got into Eleanor's
hansom, to her vivid summing-up of the case. I guessed beforehand that the
lady we were about to visit had lapsed by the most distressful degrees from
opulence to a "hall-bedroom"; that her grandfather, if he had not been
Minister to France, had signed the Declaration of Independence; that the
Rembrandt was an heirloom, sole remnant of disbanded treasures; that for
years its possessor had been unwilling to part with it, and that even now
the question of its disposal must be approached with the most diplomatic
obliquity.

Previous experience had taught me that all Eleanor's "cases" presented a
harrowing similarity of detail. No circumstance tending to excite the
spectator's sympathy and involve his action was omitted from the history of
her beneficiaries; the lights and shades were indeed so skilfully adjusted
that any impartial expression of opinion took on the hue of cruelty. I
could have produced closetfuls of "heirlooms" in attestation of this fact;
for it is one more mark of Eleanor's competence that her friends usually
pay the interest on her philanthropy. My one hope was that in this case the
object, being a picture, might reasonably be rated beyond my means; and
as our cab drew up before a blistered brown-stone door-step I formed the
self-defensive resolve to place an extreme valuation on Mrs. Fontage's
Rembrandt. It is Eleanor's fault if she is sometimes fought with her own
weapons.

The house stood in one of those shabby provisional-looking New York streets
that seem resignedly awaiting demolition. It was the kind of house that,
in its high days, must have had a bow-window with a bronze in it. The
bow-window had been replaced by a plumber's _devanture_, and one might
conceive the bronze to have gravitated to the limbo where Mexican onyx
tables and bric-a-brac in buffalo-horn await the first signs of our next
aesthetic reaction.

Eleanor swept me through a hall that smelled of poverty, up unlit stairs to
a bare slit of a room. "And she must leave this in a month!" she whispered
across her knock.

I had prepared myself for the limp widow's weed of a woman that one figures
in such a setting; and confronted abruptly with Mrs. Fontage's white-haired
erectness I had the disconcerting sense that I was somehow in her presence
at my own solicitation. I instinctively charged Eleanor with this reversal
of the situation; but a moment later I saw it must be ascribed to a
something about Mrs. Fontage that precluded the possibility of her asking
any one a favor. It was not that she was of forbidding, or even majestic,
demeanor; but that one guessed, under her aquiline prettiness, a dignity
nervously on guard against the petty betrayal of her surroundings. The
room was unconcealably poor: the little faded "relics," the high-stocked
ancestral silhouettes, the steel-engravings after Raphael and Correggio,
grouped in a vain attempt to hide the most obvious stains on the
wall-paper, served only to accentuate the contrast of a past evidently
diversified by foreign travel and the enjoyment of the arts. Even Mrs.
Fontage's dress had the air of being a last expedient, the ultimate outcome
of a much-taxed ingenuity in darning and turning. One felt that all the
poor lady's barriers were falling save that of her impregnable manner.

To this manner I found myself conveying my appreciation of being admitted
to a view of the Rembrandt.

Mrs. Fontage's smile took my homage for granted. "It is always," she
conceded, "a privilege to be in the presence of the great masters." Her
slim wrinkled hand waved me to a dusky canvas near the window.

"It's _so_ interesting, dear Mrs. Fontage," I heard Eleanor
exclaiming, "and my cousin will be able to tell you exactly--" Eleanor, in
my presence, always admits that she knows nothing about art; but she gives
the impression that this is merely because she hasn't had time to look into
the matter--and has had me to do it for her.

Mrs. Fontage seated herself without speaking, as though fearful that a
breath might disturb my communion with the masterpiece. I felt that she
thought Eleanor's reassuring ejaculations ill-timed; and in this I was of
one mind with her; for the impossibility of telling her exactly what I
thought of her Rembrandt had become clear to me at a glance.

My cousin's vivacities began to languish and the silence seemed to shape
itself into a receptacle for my verdict. I stepped back, affecting a more
distant scrutiny; and as I did so my eye caught Mrs. Fontage's profile. Her
lids trembled slightly. I took refuge in the familiar expedient of asking
the history of the picture, and she waved me brightly to a seat.

This was indeed a topic on which she could dilate. The Rembrandt, it
appeared, had come into Mr. Fontage's possession many years ago, while
the young couple were on their wedding-tour, and under circumstances so
romantic that she made no excuse for relating them in all their parenthetic
fulness. The picture belonged to an old Belgian Countess of redundant
quarterings, whom the extravagances of an ungovernable nephew had compelled
to part with her possessions (in the most private manner) about the time of
the Fontages' arrival. By a really remarkable coincidence, it happened that
their courier (an exceptionally intelligent and superior man) was an old
servant of the Countess's, and had thus been able to put them in the way of
securing the Rembrandt under the very nose of an English Duke, whose agent
had been sent to Brussels to negotiate for its purchase. Mrs. Fontage could
not recall the Duke's name, but he was a great collector and had a famous
Highland castle, where somebody had been murdered, and which she herself
had visited (by moonlight) when she had travelled in Scotland as a girl.
The episode had in short been one of the most interesting "experiences" of
a tour almost chromo-lithographic in vivacity of impression; and they had
always meant to go back to Brussels for the sake of reliving so picturesque
a moment. Circumstances (of which the narrator's surroundings declared the
nature) had persistently interfered with the projected return to Europe,
and the picture had grown doubly valuable as representing the high-water
mark of their artistic emotions. Mrs. Fontage's moist eye caressed the
canvas. "There is only," she added with a perceptible effort, "one slight
drawback: the picture is not signed. But for that the Countess, of course,
would have sold it to a museum. All the connoisseurs who have seen it
pronounce it an undoubted Rembrandt, in the artist's best manner; but the
museums"--she arched her brows in smiling recognition of a well-known
weakness--"give the preference to signed examples--"

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