As for Neville, he had a single study to show--a full length--just the back and head and the soft contour of limbs melting into a luminously sombre background--a masterpiece in technical perfection, which was instantly purchased by a wise and Western millionaire, and which left the public staring but unmoved.
But it was Jose Querida who dominated the whole show, flooding everything with the splendour of his sunshine so that all else in the same room looked cold or tawdry or washed out.

His canvas, with its superbly vigorous drawing, at once became the sensation of the exhibition.

Sunday supplements reproduced it with a photograph of Querida looking amiably at a statuette of Venus which he held in his long, tapering fingers; magazines tried to print it in two colours, in three, in dozens, and made fireworks of it to Querida's inwardly suppressed agony, and their own satisfaction.

Serious young men wrote "appreciations" about it; serious young women published instructive discourses concerning it in the daily papers.

Somebody in the valuable columns of the _Tribune_ inquired whether Querida's painting was meant to be symbolical; somebody in the _Nation_ said yes; somebody in the _Sun_ said no; somebody in something or other explained its psychological subtleties; somebody in something else screamed, "bosh!" Meanwhile the discussion was a god-send to fashionable diners-out and to those cultivated leaders of society who prefer to talk through the Opera and philharmonic.
In what the educated daily press calls the "world of art" and the "realm of literature," Querida's picture was discussed intelligently and otherwise, but it _was_ discussed--from the squalid table d'hote, where unmanicured genius punctures the air with patois and punches holes in it with frenzied thumbs, to quiet, cultivated homes, where community of taste restricts the calling lists--from the noisy studio, where pianos and girls make evenings lively, to the austere bare boards or the velvet elegance of studios where authority and preciousness, and occasionally attainment, reside, and sometimes do not.
_Cognatis maculis similis fera_.
Neville was busy, but not too busy to go about in the evening among his own kind, and among other kinds, too.