In presence of the single picture in which anything to call art had been appreciably active Ralph was luckily able--from the point of view of diversion--to treat himself to the sense of something like a prodigy. Let into the upper wainscot of the innermost and smallest of the three drawing-rooms, a charming panelled parlour lighted from the large walled court behind the house, which made a decent distance for other roofs, chimneys and windows, this work, prominent in its place over the mantel, depicted a personage who simply appeared to have sought to ignore our friend's appeal by turning away his face. This it was that constituted the prodigy, for Ralph had truly never seen a gentleman painted, and painted beautifully, in so thankless a posture. It gave the figure a conscious air which might have made for ridicule had it not so positively made for life; whereby to laugh at it would verily have been, in spite of its averted look, too much like laughing in a gentleman's face. The gentleman in question here had turned his back, and for all the world as if he had turned it within the picture. This of course was far from the first time Ralph had admired and studied him, but it was the first time of his finding his attention throb with the idea that the actual attitude might change--that it had even probably, that it had in fact repeatedly, done so. Extravagant enough such an imagination, but now settling on our young man in force--the prodigy that when one wasn't there the figure looked as figures in portraits inveterately look, somewhere into the room, and that this miraculous shift, the concealment of feature and identity, took place only when one's step drew near. Who in the world had ever "sat"--though in point of fact the model in this case stood--in a position that so trifled with the question of resemblance? The only explanation conceivable was some motive on the sitter's part--since it surely wouldn't have been on the artist's--for wishing resemblance minimised; a situation in which a refusal to sit at all would have been a much easier course. From the first occasion of his pausing there Ralph Pendrel had spun his fine thread, matching the wilful position with this and that hypothesis; only not till now had his view of the possible taken this monstrous jump. He had read into the picture the notion of a wager, a joke, or even of some particular vanity as to poise of head, form of ear, shape of shoulder, or even fit of coat, some whim of old-time elegance, some conceit of the age of the bucks--among whom, not indistinguishably, the original of the portrait might have figured. Had he otherwise, failing these possibilities, a face to be so deprecated, a face so inferior to the rest of his person as to constitute a deformity prohibitive or represent an identity in some way compromised? There was nothing Ralph had in fine been able to think of that was not more or less met by the objection that an easier choice is usually open to the afflicted and the dishonoured.