The Rembrandt

"You're _so_ artistic," my cousin Eleanor Copt began.

Of all Eleanor's exordiums it is the one I most dread. When she tells me
I'm so clever I know this is merely the preamble to inviting me to meet the
last literary obscurity of the moment: a trial to be evaded or endured, as
circumstances dictate; whereas her calling me artistic fatally connotes
the request to visit, in her company, some distressed gentlewoman whose
future hangs on my valuation of her old Saxe or of her grandfather's
Marc Antonios. Time was when I attempted to resist these compulsions of
Eleanor's; but I soon learned that, short of actual flight, there was
no refuge from her beneficent despotism. It is not always easy for the
curator of a museum to abandon his post on the plea of escaping a pretty
cousin's importunities; and Eleanor, aware of my predicament, is none
too magnanimous to take advantage of it. Magnanimity is, in fact, not in
Eleanor's line. The virtues, she once explained to me, are like bonnets:
the very ones that look best on other people may not happen to suit one's
own particular style; and she added, with a slight deflection of metaphor,
that none of the ready-made virtues ever _had_ fitted her: they all
pinched somewhere, and she'd given up trying to wear them.

Therefore when she said to me, "You're _so_ artistic." emphasizing the
conjunction with a tap of her dripping umbrella (Eleanor is out in all
weathers: the elements are as powerless against her as man), I merely
stipulated, "It's not old Saxe again?"

She shook her head reassuringly. "A picture--a Rembrandt!"

"Good Lord! Why not a Leonardo?"

"Well"--she smiled--"that, of course, depends on _you_."

"On me?"

"On your attribution. I dare say Mrs. Fontage would consent to the
change--though she's very conservative."

A gleam of hope came to me and I pronounced: "One can't judge of a picture
in this weather."

"Of course not. I'm coming for you to-morrow."

"I've an engagement to-morrow."

"I'll come before or after your engagement."

The afternoon paper lay at my elbow and I contrived a furtive consultation
of the weather-report. It said "Rain to-morrow," and I answered briskly:
"All right, then; come at ten"--rapidly calculating that the clouds on
which I counted might lift by noon.

My ingenuity failed of its due reward; for the heavens, as if in league
with my cousin, emptied themselves before morning, and punctually at ten
Eleanor and the sun appeared together in my office.

I hardly listened, as we descended the Museum steps and got into Eleanor's