Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 1, 2025
"Well," he said, "it's good to know that when one tries to fail one can make such a complete success of it." "Tries to fail?" "Well, no; that's not quite it, either; I didn't want to make a failure of Vard's picture, but I did so deliberately, with my eyes open, all the same. It was what one might call a lucid failure." "But why ?" "The why of it is rather complicated.
We were all surprisingly vivid it felt, somehow, as though we were being photographed by flash-light... It was the best sitting we'd ever had but unfortunately it didn't last more than ten minutes. It was Vard's secretary who interrupted us a slinking chap called Cornley, who burst in, as white as sweetbread, with the face of a depositor who hears his bank has stopped payment.
Yes, it was true we had all asked Vard to dine. It was some comfort to think that fate had made him expiate our weakness. Lillo put the sketch on the mantel-shelf and drew his arm-chair to the fire. "It's cold to-night. Take another cigar, old man; and some whiskey? There ought to be a bottle and some glasses in that cupboard behind you... help yourself..." About Vard's portrait?
One of Vard's associates Bardwell, wasn't it? threatened disclosures. The rival machine got hold of him, the Independents took him to their bosom, and the press shrieked for an investigation. It was not the first storm Vard had weathered, and his face wore just the right shade of cool vigilance; he wasn't the man to fall into the mistake of appearing too easy.
Even then I felt a pang at the use to which fate had put the mountain-pool of Miss Vard's spirit, and an uneasy sense that my own reflection there was not one to linger over. It was odd that I should have scrupled to deceive, on one small point, a girl already so hugely cheated; perhaps it was the completeness of her delusion that gave it the sanctity of a religious belief.
Alonzo Vard's suicide he killed himself, strangely enough, the day that Lillo's pictures were first shown had made his portrait the chief feature of the exhibition. It had been painted ten or twelve years earlier, when the terrible "Boss" was at the height of his power; and if ever man presented a type to stimulate such insight as Lillo's, that man was Vard; yet the portrait was a failure.
At the studio which was less draped, less posed, less consciously "artistic" than those of the smaller men he handed me a cigar, and fell to smoking before the fire. When he began to talk it was of indifferent matters, and I had dismissed the hope of hearing more of Vard's portrait, when my eye lit on a photograph of the picture.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking