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Within a very few years historians have begun to see this defect, and such men as Green, Lodge, and MacMaster have undertaken to give us histories of the people, the first and last taking the lead on their respective sides of the Atlantic. MacMaster's work is excellent as far as it goes. His first volume is deep and scholarly, and does credit to American literature.
In response to MacMaster's ring, the door was opened by a cleanly built little man, clad in a shooting jacket and trousers that had been made for an ampler figure. He had a fresh complexion, eyes of that common uncertain shade of gray, and was closely shaven except for the incipient muttonchops on his ruddy cheeks.
Toward the close of the season Lady Ellen Treffinger left town. MacMaster's work was progressing rapidly, and he and James wore away the days in their peculiar relation, which by this time had much of friendliness. Excepting for the regular visits of a Jewish picture dealer, there were few intrusions upon their solitude.
There still remained, however, Treffinger's great unfinished picture, the Marriage of Phaedra, which had never left his studio, and of which MacMaster's friends had now and again brought report that it was the painter's most characteristic production. The young man arrived in London in the evening, and the next morning went out to Kensington to find Treffinger's studio.
By this time the first chapters of MacMaster's book were in the hands of his publisher, and his visits to the studio were necessarily less frequent. The greater part of his time was now employed with the engravers who were to reproduce such of Treffinger's pictures as he intended to use as illustrations.
When at last James became anecdotal, personal, there was that in every word he let fall which put breath and blood into MacMaster's book. James had so long been steeped in that penetrating personality that he fairly exuded it. Many of his very phrases, mannerisms, and opinions were impressions that he had taken on like wet plaster in his daily contact with Treffinger.
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