It was the first indiscretion he had committed for so long that he went and sat down in an alcove. What had possessed himto give his card to a rackety young fellow, who went about with a thing like that? And Fleur, always at the back of histhoughts, started out like a filagree figure from a clock when the hour strikes. On the screen opposite the alcove was alarge canvas with a great many square tomato-colored blobs on it, and nothing else, so far as Soames could see from where hesat. He looked at his catalogue: “No. 32 —‘The Future Town’— Paul Post.” ‘I suppose that’s satiric too,’ he thought. ‘What athing!’ But his second impulse was more cautious. It did not do to condemn hurriedly. There had been those stripey, streakycreations of Monet’s, which had turned out such trumps; and then the stippled school; and Gauguin. Why, even since thePost-Impressionists there had been one or two painters not to be sneezed at. During the thirty-eight years of hisconnoisseur’s life, indeed, he had marked so many “movements,” seen the tides of taste and technique so ebb and flow, thatthere was really no telling anything except that there was money to be made out of every change of fashion. This too mightquite well be a case where one must subdue primordial instinct, or lose the market. He got up and stood before the picture,trying hard to see it with the eyes of other people. Above the tomato blobs was what he took to be a sunset, till some onepassing said: “He’s got the airplanes wonderfully, don’t you think!” Below the tomato blobs was a band of white withvertical black stripes, to which he could assign no meaning whatever, till some one else came by, murmuring: “Whatexpression he gets with his foreground!” Expression? Of what? Soames went back to his seat. The thing was “rich,” as hisfather would have said, and he wouldn’t give a damn for it. Expression! Ah! they were all Expressionists now, he had heard,on the Continent. So it was coming here too, was it? He remembered the first wave of influenza in 1887 — or 8 — hatched inChina, so they said. He wondered where this — this Expressionism — had been hatched. The thing was a regular disease!