 But
just before the vehicle began to move he said, »Well, when you have in fact
dispatched it, I hope you will let me know!«
 

                                      VII

Felix Young finished Gertrude's portrait, and he afterwards transferred to
canvas the features of many members of that circle of which it may be said that
he had become for the time the pivot and the centre. I am afraid it must be
confessed that he was a decidedly flattering painter, and that he imparted to
his models a romantic grace which seemed easily and cheaply acquired by the
payment of a hundred dollars to a young man who made sitting so entertaining.
For Felix was paid for his pictures, making, as he did, no secret of the fact
that in guiding his steps to the Western world affectionate curiosity had gone
hand in hand with a desire to better his condition. He took his uncle's portrait
quite as if Mr. Wentworth had never averted himself from the experiment; and as
he compassed his end only by the exercise of gentle violence, it is but fair to
add that he allowed the old man to give him nothing but his time. He passed his
arm into Mr. Wentworth's one summer morning - very few arms indeed had ever
passed into Mr. Wentworth's - and led him across the garden and along the road
into the studio which he had extemporized in the little house among the
apple-trees. The grave gentleman felt himself more and more fascinated by his
clever nephew, whose fresh, demonstrative youth seemed a compendium of
experiences so strangely numerous. It appeared to him that Felix must know a
great deal; he would like to learn what he thought about some of those things as
regards which his own conversation had always been formal, but his knowledge
vague. Felix had a confident, gayly trenchant way of judging human actions which
Mr. Wentworth grew little by little to envy; it seemed like criticism made easy.
Forming an opinion - say on a person's conduct - was, with Mr. Wentworth, a good
deal like fumbling in a lock with a key chosen at hazard. He seemed to himself
to go about the world with a big bunch of these ineffectual instruments at his
girdle. His nephew, on the other hand, with a single turn of the wrist, opened
any door as adroitly as a horse-thief. He felt obliged to keep up the convention
that an uncle is always wiser than a nephew, even if he could keep it up no
otherwise than by listening in serious silence to Felix's quick, light, constant
discourse. But
