The Listening Eye

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THE gallery was well lighted. Paulina Paine had a vague feeling that it was too well lighted. A good many of the pictures might have looked better if it had not been possible to see them quite so clearly. Everything about Miss Paine declared that she was a sensible person. She was fifty-seven, and she wore the kind of clothes which she considered appropriate to her age and her position in life. Her sturdy form was comfortably and sensibly attired in a thick tweed coat, grey with a black and white fleck in it. She wore sensible laced-up shoes and a dark grey felt hat with a plain black ribbon. She could not, in fact, have looked a less likely person to be visiting one of those small winter shows which display the kind of picture more calculated to shock than to sell. Unless, of course, the artist suddenly becomes famous, in which case art critics embark upon lively praise, dispraise, and argument, and millionaires begin to compete. Miss Paine was not here because she admired this type of work. Far from it. She did not. But if someone paints your portrait and it is put in an exhibition, you do feel obliged to go and see what it looks like there. As a matter of fact she thought it looked very well-much better than it had done in David Moray’s studio, which was the rather flattering name he had bestowed upon her top attic, a bare untidy room in which he cooked horrid-smelling messes and slept on an iron bedstead several sizes too small for him. She stood in front of the portrait and was gratified on two points. It wasn’t labelled with her name. It wasn’t even called Portrait of a Lady, or, more realistically, of a landlady. It was just called The Listener, and she could see what David meant by the name-there was that kind of look about the eyes, and the turn of the head.

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