John Campton, the American portrait-painter, stood in his bare studio in Montmartre at the end of a summer afternoon contemplating¹ a battered² calendar that hung against the wall.

 

The calendar marked July 30, 1914.

 

Campton looked at this date with a gaze of unmixed satisfaction. His son, his only boy, who was coming from America, must have landed in England that morning, and after a brief halt in London would join him the next evening in Paris. To bring the moment nearer, Campton, smiling at his weakness, tore off the leaf and uncovered the 31. Then, leaning in the window, he looked out over his untidy scrap³ of garden at the silver-grey sea of Paris spreading mistily⁴ below him.

 

A number of visitors had passed through the studio that day. After years of obscurity Campton had been projected into the light—or perhaps only into the limelight—by his portrait of his son George, exhibited three years earlier at the spring show of the French Society of Painters and Sculptors⁵. The picture seemed to its author to be exactly in the line of the unnoticed things he had been showing before, though perhaps 4nearer to what he was always trying for, because of the exceptional interest of his subject. But to the public he had appeared to take a new turn; or perhaps some critic had suddenly found the right phrase for him; or, that season, people wanted a new painter to talk about. Didn’t he know by heart all the Paris reasons for success or failure?

 

The early years of his career had given him ample opportunity to learn them. Like other young students of his generation, he had come to Paris with an exaggerated reverence⁶ for the few conspicuous⁷ figures who made the old Salons⁸ of the ’eighties like bad plays written around a few stars. If he could get near enough to Beausite, the ruling light of the

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