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John Campton, the American portrait-painter, stood in his bare studio in Montmartre at the end ofa summer afternoon contemplating a battered 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 wascoming from America, must have landed in England that morning, and after a brief halt in Londonwould join him the next evening in Paris. To bring the moment nearer, Campton, smiling at hisweakness, tore off the leaf and uncovered the 31. Then, leaning in the window, he looked out overhis untidy scrap of garden at the silver-grey sea of Paris spreading mistily below him.A number of visitors had passed through the studio that day. After years of obscurity Camptonhad been projected into the light-or perhaps only into the limelight-by his portrait of his sonGeorge, exhibited three years earlier at the spring show of the French Society of Painters andSculptors. The picture seemed to its author to be exactly in the line of the unnoticed things he hadbeen showing before, though perhaps nearer to what he was always trying for, because of theexceptional interest of his subject. But to the public he had appeared to take a new turn; or perhapssome critic had suddenly found the right phrase for him; or, that season, people wanted a newpainter 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 youngstudents of his generation, he had come to Paris with an exaggerated reverence for the fewconspicuous figures who made the old Salons of the 'eighties like bad plays written around a fewstars. If he could get near enough to Beausite, the ruling light of the galaxy, he thought he might dothings not unworthy of that great master; but Beausite, who had ceased to receive pupils, saw noreason for making an exception in favour of an obscure youth without a backing. He was not kind;and on the only occasion when a painting of Campton's came under his eye he let fall an epigramwhich went the round of Paris, but shocked its victim by its revelation of the great man's ineptitude.Campton, if he could have gone on admiring Beausite's work, would have forgotten hisunkindness and even his critical incapacity; but as the young painter's personal convictionsdeveloped he discovered that his idol had none, and that the dazzling maestria still enveloping hiswork was only the light from a dead star.

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