Nothing like this had come his way for years. It made La Giaconda look like a poster.

The Midget examined his virgin teacup, put a practised hand against the teapot's tepid cheek, and pouted. She had better things to do, she conveyed, than bring him trays for him to ignore.

He pushed the portrait at her.

What did she think of it? If that man were her patient what would be her verdict?

'Liver,' she said crisply, and bore away the tray in heel-tapping protest, all starch and blonde curls.

But the surgeon, strolling in against her draught, kindly and casual, had other views. He looked at the portrait, as invited, and said after a moment's interested scrutiny:

'Poliomyelitis.'

'Infantile paralysis?' Grant said; and remembered all of a sudden that Richard III had a withered arm.

'Who is it?' the surgeon asked.

'Richard the Third.'

'Really? That's interesting.'

'Did you know that he had a withered arm?'

'Had he? I didn't remember that. I thought he was a hunchback.'

'So he was.'

'What I do remember is that he was born with a full set of teeth and ate live frogs. Well, my diagnosis seems to be abnormally accurate.'

'Uncanny. What made you choose polio?'

'I don't quite know, now that you ask me to be definitive, just the look of the face, I suppose. It's the look one sees on the face of a crippled child. If he was born hunchbacked that probably accounts for it and not polio. I notice the artist has left out the hump.'

'Yes. Court painters have to have a modicum of tact. It wasn't until Cromwell that sitters asked for "warts and all".'

'If you ask me,' the surgeon said, absentmindedly considering the splint on Grant's leg, 'Cromwell started that inverted snobbery from which we are all suffering today. "I'm a plain man, I am; no nonsense about me." And no manners, grace, or generosity, either.' He pinched Grant's toe with detached interest. 'It's a raging disease. A horrible perversion. In some parts of the States, I understand, it's as much as a man's political life is worth to go to some constituencies with his tie tied and his coat on. That's being stuffed-shirt. The beau ideal is to be one of the boys. That's looking very healthy,' he added, referring to Grant's big toe, and came back of his own accord to the portrait lying on the counterpane.

'Interesting,' he said, 'that about the polio. Perhaps it really was polio, and that accounts for the shrunken arm.' He went on considering it, making no movement to go. 'Interesting, anyhow. Portrait of a murderer. Does he run to type, would you say?'

'There isn't a murder type. People murder for too many different reasons. But I can't remember any murderer, either in my own experience, or in case-histories, who resembled him.'

'Of course he was hors concours in his class, wasn't he. He couldn't have known the meaning of scruple.'

'No.'

'I once saw Olivier play him. The most dazzling exhibition of sheer evil, it was. Always on the verge of toppling over into the grotesque, and never doing it.'

'When I showed you the portrait,' Grant said, 'before you knew who it was, did you think of villainy?'

'No,' said the surgeon, 'no, I thought of illness.'

'It's odd, isn't it. I didn't think of villainy either. And now that I know who it is, now that I've read the name on the back, I can't think of it as anything but villainous.'

'I suppose villainy, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.