Our advancements are broken or delayed by unexpected returnings to our beginnings, and my story is that a young man whom I had known at Jurles's asked me to visit him for the hunting season, and that I met a man at his house who had a horse running at Croydon but was without a jockey. So it was natural to me to propose myself, and rely on Joseph Applely's promptitude to send me my father's racing breeches and boots, which he did; and the farce was gone through of taking them down to Croydon, though the owner had written saying that he intended, or half intended, to scratch the horse, his warning serving no purpose, for we are all mummers, and life being but a mumming, it was pleasant to think of myself taking all the jumps, the water-jump especially, in front of the stand. But to do this it was necessary to go down prepared, the breeches and boots in a brown-paper parcel under my arm, the parcel helping me to realise myself as a steeplechase jockey. No doubt that with some luck I should have got the horse round the course as well as another, but the owner having scratched the horse, and the day being wet and the Ring a couple of inches deep in mud, the result of that Croydon meeting was for me a severe cold that prevented me from taking my driving-lesson from Ward, one of the great coachmen of that time, a lesson that I sorely needed, for I had engaged to drive a coach down to Epsom.

All the same, on four lessons this feat was accomplished, the horses meeting with no serious accident, and, encouraged by my luck, a few weeks afterwards the same party was invited by me to a great gala dinner at Richmond, and while the coach was being led over several hillocks through the furze bushes on to the dusty road, for in the darkness we had wandered into Wandsworth Common, one of my guests said to me: You mustn't think of giving up driving; your luck will never desert you. But four horses galloping on Wandsworth Common in the middle of the night! Margaret Gilray whispered to her cousin, Sally Giles. I wish we were safely at home.

These excursions passed the summer away, and in August Sally and Margaret were bidden goodbye. Belfort's brother, who was going to be married and wished to make a splash before doing so, had hired a lodge in Ross-shire. He had invited his brother, and his brother had been allowed to invite me; a great event this was, and hours were spent at the tailors' considering different patterns; at the hosiers' turning over scarves, neckties, and shirts of many descriptions, frilled and plain; and when my mother said that I could not have both a dressing-case costing fifty pounds and a pair of guns, I decided to have the dressing-case and to send to Moore Hall for my father's muzzle-loaders, and though forty years have gone by, I can still smile at the astonishment that the guns inspired in the Ross-shire shooting-lodge. And when it was noticed that the locks were noiseless, Captain H——, who had been told off as my companion on the morrow, was soon interested in them, and spent most of the evening with a toothbrush trying to clean them, succeeding at last in producing a faint clicking, but not enough to convince him that he would be safe while shooting with me. It were better, he thought, to lend me one of his guns, and the breech-loader, the first that I held in my hands, was held fairly straight, and my bag was numerous for a boy of my appearance and conversation. Captain H—— had begun to feel that if by chance my bag were the bigger, he would be wickedly chaffed, and this misfortune might have happened to him if the boots that had won my fancy in the Sloane Street shop-window had not begun to break up, the pretty clasps and buckles being unable to resist the tough Ross-shire heather.

I can't think how you ever came by such boots. Where did you get them? They are as wonderful as your guns! How do you contrive to hit off the extraordinary?

And I told him that it was not until the last moment, between six and seven in the evening, that I remembered I had forgotten to order any shooting boots. My feet, you see, being as small as a woman's, the ready-made shooting boots in the Brompton Road were too large for me; all the shops were shutting, I was getting frantic when I saw a line of boots in a shop-window in Sloane Street marked Ladies' Boots for the Highlands! They'll fit me, I said to myself. You see they do, only—

I shall have to take you round tomorrow to the local cobbler.

The noiseless locks, the ladies' boots, and the admission that I was always in love supplied the Ross-shire shooting-lodge with matter for humorous conversation, and as I sat before my fire in Ely Place I heard my nickname, Mr Perpetual. To be ridiculous has always been ma petite luxe, but can any one be said to be ridiculous if he knows that he is ridiculous? Not very well. It is the pompous that are truly ridiculous. A random thought carried me out of Ely Place across the years to Lodge Road, and I can see myself and the company and the room: a round table on which are beef and salad, Cheshire cheese and beer, the supper provided by the fair cousins. Canaries are shrilling in their cages, and the bow-window is hung with rep curtains, and the sofa, too, is rep. There is wax fruit on the sideboard, and Sally and Margaret wear the tight bum-revealing dresses that succeeded the pious crinoline. Side-whiskers have not disappeared altogether; Belfort and myself, Humphries and Norton—two cavalry officers—are shaved only to mid-cheek. Incident after incident rises up and floats away like cigarette smoke, one incident retaining my attention a little longer than the others—the evening that Belfort refused to smoke one of my cigars, saying that he preferred to smoke one of his own manillas. He lighted one, and it was just beginning to draw when, impertinently, I tore it out of his teeth and flung it into the fire. A joke it had seemed to me, but he rushed for the poker and would have brained me with it if I had not slipped round the table and seized Colville's sword and, unsheathing it in a moment, warded off the blow aimed at my head, and seeing another coming, it occurred to me that the best way to save myself would be to run Belfort through, and he would have received a thrust that might have done for him if one of the cavalry officers had not armed himself with a chair. The sword sank in the upholstery, and by that time Belfort had recovered his temper, and a few minutes after he was smoking one of my cigars in token of reconciliation. One of the cavalry officers asleep on the sofa is another memory that Time has not rubbed away, and Margaret coming to sit on my knees, perhaps because she had been warned not to inflame Mr Perpetual. Her dressmaker had brought home a beautiful blue tea-gown that evening; she was wearing it for the first time, and its folds of corded silk floated over my knees. The very weight and shape of her are remembered, and our inquietude whether the officer was shamming sleep or was asleep. The tea-gown had seemed to me the very painting robe that I needed, for art was never altogether out of my mind, and I had been thinking for some time of Saturn sitting in the shady sadness of a vale as a subject for a picture that my poor dead Oliver would have liked to paint. It would have been of no avail to offer it to Jim Browne, for he could not draw from Nature. A few months later I discovered another which he would have carried out if he had lived: the Witch of Atlas calls to Hermaphroditus, and I could see his wings catching the fainting airs bearing the boat up the shadowy stream to the austral waters beyond the fabulous Thamondacona, without, however, being able to arrange the figures so that they filled the canvas—the sinuous back of the witch, her arm upon the helm, looking up at Hermaphroditus; and one day Jim Browne was implored to say what was wrong with the composition.

Give me your palette and go upstairs and dress yourself. Take off that ridiculous garment, he added, thereby humiliating me, for Margaret Gilray's tea-gown had seemed an excellent painting robe, an advance on the smock which Jim wore in his own studio. But it would be henceforth discarded, for Jim was now my mentor, my hero, my boon companion. It was my pride to be seen in Piccadilly with this fine Victorian gentleman whom I recall best on a wintry day; he never wore an overcoat, but buttoned his braided coat tightly about him and swung a big stick. Long flaxen locks fell thick over the collar, and his pegtops blew about in the wind; he was known to everybody as Piccadilly Jim or Piccadilly Browne, I have forgotten which. We met everybody between Hyde Park Corner and St James's Street, and Jim saluted his acquaintances with a How are you? never a How do you do? He very rarely stopped to speak to any, but strode on quickly, mentioning the name of the passer-by, and I could but try to fix in my memory the appearance of the notable, regretting that Jim did not stop, that I had not been introduced. He liked to quiz me, and sometimes there was plenty of reason for mockery, and sometimes there was none, but in either case he quizzed me, turning some simple phrase into ridicule, as when I mentioned, regretfully—perhaps it was the note of regret in my voice that caused him to laugh at me—that my hair was yellower than his. How he used to drag out the word yellow, making me feel dreadfully ashamed of myself, until at last summoning up courage, I asked him if there was anything foolish in what I had said, and to my surprise he answered no. Then why had he been laughing at me all this while? and I listened to Jim again, for he was now asking, out of politeness—he always decided these questions—whether it would be more amusing to dine at the St James's or at Kettners' or at the Café de la Régence. It did not matter which. In whichever he might choose I could learn his taste in food, and my hope was that with practice I might acquire it; his taste in everything seemed essential, especially in women, and to make myself more perfectly acquainted with it, I drew his attention to the ladies dining at the distant tables, never daring, however, to hazard an opinion unless one seemed to realise all the ideals of beauty set forth in his pictures, and if he deigned to approve of any woman's face and figure at Cremorne Gardens or in the Argyle Rooms, I used to mark her down for future study. My mistakes were numerous, and I was ashamed if he caught me talking to a woman whom he did not admire, and very proud if my choice met his approval, as it happened to do one day in the Park. I had stopped to speak to Kitty Carew, letting his walk on in front, and on overtaking him half-way down the pathway, he said: Yes, indeed, a very pretty woman. You were in luck, George, when you picked her up.

Jim's satellite I was, but given to wandering out of my orbit. There were other companions whom Jim looked upon contemptuously—the Maitlands—and Jim's contempt was shared by my gaunt Irish servant, William Mullowney, who used to enrage me when he came into the drawing-room with his Sor, Mr Dhurty Maitland has called to see you. It was quite true that Sydenham presented a somewhat neglected appearance, but however just William's criticism might be, he could not be allowed to speak to me of my friends with contempt. This Derrinanny savage must be sent back to Moore Hall, I said. But a moment's indignation does not add much to my story; I must tell how I made Sydenham's acquaintance.

When we arrived from Mayo we had gone to live in Thurloe Square, in the house of a very genteel lady who did not let lodgings but who might be persuaded, so the house agent had said, to let us have her drawing-room floor and some bedrooms for five or six guineas a week. She often asked me into her parlour and talked to me about her connections and the neighbourhood, and, seeing I was at a loose end without companions, inspired by some connection of ideas, she said one day she would introduce me to the Maitland boys, the sons of a retired stipendiary magistrate from Athlone. The mother was a wonderful pianist, the boys were all clever, the three younger sons had a room to themselves at the bottom of the house where they painted scenery, wrote verses, and composed music. William and Dick, the two elder brothers, had taken the Lyceum Theatre, and were going to produce Chilperic, a comic opera by Hervé. She tapped at the window and Sydenham came in, and his news was that a letter had arrived that morning from Hervé. He was coming over to play the title-rôle himself. Everything is relative, and at that moment of my life it was very wonderful for me to go to the Maitlands' house and to hear the scores of Chilperic played by Sydenham and his mother. We received boxes and stalls from the Maitlands, and after a run of nearly six months, Chilperic was taken off to make way for the composer's later opera, Le Petit Faust. But it did not please as much as its predecessor, and the theatre had to be closed. Dick had, however, managed to escape bankruptcy; half a success guarantees that another door shall be opened to the retiring manager, and in the 'seventies, a few months after my father's death, he brought over the entire company from Les Folies Dramatiques to play in French, Chilperic, L'Oeil Crevé, Le Canard à Trois Becs, and possibly Le Petit Faust. He sent me seats whenever I asked him, and I used to sit in the stalls learning all the little choruses and couplets night after night, admiring Paola Mariée, a pretty and plump brunette, who sang enchantingly as she tripped across the stage, and Blanche d'Antigny, a tall fair woman who played the part of a young shepherd. She wore a white sheepskin about her loins, and looked as if she had walked out of Jim's pictures. I learnt from Dick that she was a great light-o'-love, sharing the Kingdom of Desire with Hortense Schneider and Léonie Leblanc.

It was well to sit in the stalls as Dick's guest, and it would have been wonderful to accompany him through the stage door on to the stage, and be introduced to the French actresses to whom he spoke in French every night. But I could not speak French, and I vowed to learn the language of these women, who disappeared suddenly like the swallows, leaving me meditating what lives they lived in Paris, until Dick's new theatrical venture, a translation of Offenbach's Brigands, put them out of my head. For he had collected in the Globe Theatre the most beautiful women in London to form the corps of the gendarmerie that always arrived an hour too late to arrest the brigands; and one of the attractions of the piece was Mademoiselle d'Anka, a beautiful Hungarian, who sang Offenbach's little ditties bewitchingly, and a song that Arthur Sullivan had written for her, Looking Back. Madame Debreux, a pretty brunette whom Dick had brought over, for he loved her, was in the cast, and Nelly Bromley, who was loved by the Duke of Beaufort, was in it too. A lovelier garland was never wreathed, and there was no lovelier flower in it than Marie de Grey, who never kissed any one except for her pleasure, and yet managed to live at the rate of three or four thousand a year. There was a woman who wore a green dress in the second act; her nose was too large, but her thighs were beautiful; and there was a pretty, tall, fair woman, whom I ran across in Covent Garden on her way to the theatre, and whom I took to lunch. She would have loved me if my heart had not been engaged elsewhere, but, as usual, I abandoned the prey for the shadow. And the shadow was the stately Annie Temple, who dared not listen to my courtship for dread of the rage of her fierce cavalry officer, a stupid fellow who snarled at me once so threateningly at the stage door that Annie must fain refuse me her photograph. Dot Robins's mother sold me one for a sovereign, and from it I painted many portraits. Jim painted one from memory, mentioning again and again while he painted it that Annie was as tall as Mademoiselle d'Anka, whose acquaintance he had made on her arrival in London, before the theatre opened. It was he who introduced me to her, and he was glad now that I was able to get free seats at the Globe, and disappointed that Dick would not allow me to bring him behind the scenes. I should have liked to chaperon him, but it was a feather in my cap to leave him sitting in his box and skip away to the dressing-rooms, and when I returned we would lay our heads together trying to discover which was the handsomer woman, Annie Temple or Marie de Grey. Annie, in his opinion, was the finer woman, being as big, in fact, as Alice Harford, and he confided to me then and there that he used to meet Alice in a most romantic nook at the end of a little paved alley off the Fulham Road. He believed her to be in keeping and unfaithful only with him; all the same, she proposed one night at Cremorne to meet me at the nook; and delighted with my success, I could not refrain from telling Jim all about it, just to take him down a peg. But the result of this indiscretion was that Alice did not come to the nook at the time appointed, and I walked down the paved alley meditating that once again I had missed the prey for the shadow. And, as if my punishment were not enough, Jim continued to talk of her beauty, telling that her legs were shapelier than Mademoiselle d'Anka's; they did not go in at the knee, and this great beauty, or this great fault, formed the theme of many conversations in the studio in Prince's Gardens; Boucher's women did not go in at the knee, but Rubens's did, and laying his palette aside, Jim would throw himself on the sofa and tell me for the hundredth time that the only women worth loving were tall women with abundant bosom and flaxen hair, the only women that men with a sense of the beautiful could admire.

But long before this my guardian, Lord Sligo, wrote Jim a letter which brought him round to Alfred Place, and sitting on the edge of the table he read it to my mother, saying that if she agreed with Sligo's strictures, there would be nothing for him to do but to refuse to see George any more, and if she didn't agree with Sligo, the best thing would be to write to him saying that she thought Sligo was mistaken. Foreseeing that Lord Sligo would read any such letter from her as Please mind your own business, my mother hesitated, but I insisted, feeling that Jim's friendship was necessary to me. All the same, Lord Sligo's letter was not without avail. It stimulated Jim to moralise, and when I called in the afternoon to ask him if he would come up to Piccadilly to dine somewhere, and go on to the Argyle Rooms, he would read me a long lecture on the dangers of women.

The strong and healthy man refrains from women, and when I asked him if he always refrained from them himself he said he refrained as long as he could, and advocated a strong and energetic life to me. He said he would like to see me shoulder a gun and go away; not to Scotland to shoot grouse, but to Africa. Every young man should go forth and lead a natural life. Abyssinia was often mentioned, and to discover the source of the Nile was held up to me as an ambition suitable to my health and my fortunes. I should come back a far finer man than I went out. Alice Harford and Annie Temple were probably given to us so that we might resist their seductions, which were very trivial to a man who had got anything in him. And if Abbyssinia and the source of the Nile appeared too slight an adventure, there remained the Sahara and the Mountains of the Moon and Timbuctoo, where no European had been, but which a determined man might reach, and in his imagination Jim would roam through the great equatorial forests, filled, he said, with cities, relics of a civilisation that had passed away, now inhabitated only by lions, and to encourage me to accept an African adventure he would pull out a picture of a troop of elephants plunging through some reeds into a river while a gorilla disported himself on the branches of a dead tree. This led us to consider the exploits of Du Chaillu, who had shot the first gorilla. The animal had approached thumping his breasts with his fists, and the sound that he produced was that of a big drum. Du Chaillu had, however, knelt unmoved, saying to himself, Not yet. The gorilla approached another ten steps, and Du Chaillu said, Not yet; and again the gorilla approached, and Du Chaillu said, Fire! and the gorilla rolled over dead at Du Chaillu's feet after twisting the rifle as if it were a bit of wire. Jim admired such nerve as this, and it recalled to him an excellent shot he had made years ago when he was staying at Moore Hall. He had said he would like to shoot a marten, and had taken a rifle with him; martens were rare even at that time, but he had caught sight of one at the end of a branch, and had shot it, and the incident had inspired him to think that he would like to wait for a lion in the moonlight at the foot of a tree. A moment like that is worth living for! And exalted by the thought he would seize his palette and paint Cain amid the rocks by the sea under a darkening sky, his arm thrown about his sleeping sister, a spear within his right arm; and as if the terrific lion stealing down upon him were not sufficient terror, Jim would sketch a lioness and her whelps in the background. As all the beasts in the picture were roaring, Jim roared in accompaniment, while whirling a mass of vermilion and white upon his palette; and then, uttering a deep growl, he would rush forward and a red tongue would appear; and when he had mixed emerald green with white he would advance some paces, cat-like, and then, snarling, would leap forward, and a moment after a great green eye started out of the darkness.

He retreated to watch the effect of his work, and in the frenzy of creation, soliloquised, explaining to himself, and to me, the reason why his pictures were refused by the Academy. The art that the Academicians catered for was a meanly realistic art, and for them to accept his picture of Cain defending his wife from wild beasts, the lion's mane would have to be painted from the bearskin rug, every hair put in; and the dove that Jim's memory of Alice Harford had rescued from Cupid and which she clasped to her bosom, would have to be studied from a dead pigeon sent round from the poulterer's.

Alice's great blonde body was finely conceived, and the movement of her shoulders bending over the eager boy was well enough, somewhat rudimentary, but better in a way than the frigid sophistications that pass for art in Burlington House. If he had nothing else he had the sense of the noble and the beautiful, but was he speaking the whole truth when he said that the Academicians would hang the picture if every feather were imitated from real feathers? Did he believe it to be as well painted as the Correggio in the National Gallery? Was the modelling of that shoulder altogether faultless? Was it not emptier than the Correggio? Was not the Correggio more real? At that moment it became clear to me that the feet were not as beautiful as those in the bright picture of the Italian master, and that Jim could not make them as beautiful, for he had not learned to draw and to paint from Nature. If he had gone to the Academy schools and subjected his genius to discipline, he might have been the great painter of modern times; but I could not see Jim attending the Academy schools, drawing patiently from the model, working out the shadows with a stump. My thoughts must have stopped there if they ever got quite so far; and now the explanation of the enigma seems to me that Jim was one born before due time and out of due place, in Mayo in 1830. For his talent to have ripened fully he should have been born in Venice in 1660. His mentality was of that period, and his appearance coincided with his talent—splendid shoulders, fine head upreared, an over-modelled brow, a short aquiline nose, proud nostrils, long languid hands. But why enumerate? A portrait by Van Dyck.

Get out of my way, he cried, and squeezing out the best part of a tube of raw umber on his palette and breaking it with a little black, he whisked in the lion's tail, and with another brush sought out the yellow ochre and the Naples yellow, and Cain's wife received such a dower of tresses that I was thrilled. It was my sense of the voluptuous and romantic that drew me to Jim and his pictures, and I remember him crossing the room one day and seeking among the canvases and returning with a small one, six feet by four, in which a brown satyr overtook a nymph at the corner of a wood. My eyes dilated and I licked my lips.

The best thing you have ever painted in your life, Jim. Why do you turn it away to the wall?

He murmured something about his sisters who sometimes came into the room unexpectedly, and throwing himself on the sofa melted into another of those long soliloquies very dear to me at that time—a flow of talk of Michael Angelo, Rubens, and Raphael; and mixed with his remembrances of the pictures he had seen in Italy were remembrances of pictures and statues that he had modelled and painted himself, the colossal statue of Caractacus that he had exhibited in London when he was seventeen, and the great picture of the Battle of Arbela, forty feet wide by twenty feet high, containing several life-size elephants. At that time he had painted and modelled in the same studio, leaving the picture for the statue and the statue for the picture, and, my admiration roused, I begged him to tell me where were these pictures and this statue; but without answering my question he broke into a criticism of Ary Scheffer's picture of the Devil offering Christ the Kingdom of Earth if he would cast himself down and worship him. Christ raises his hand and the gesture portrays the famous words, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God, while the Devil points downward.

The two men are speaking at the same time.

And in your picture, Jim?

Christ listens while the Devil offers him the earth, he answered, and he did not speak again for a long time so that I might better appreciate his genius. An intense moment of appreciation was when he said that no gallery in the world afforded so many beautiful pictures to his sight as did a dirty ceiling. He had only to half close his eyes to see Last Judgments finer than Michael Angelo's, and if he closed his eyes a little he could rediscover his Battle of Arbela.

The lost picture, I said. But, Jim, the satyr overturning the nymph; is he visible in the ceiling above your head?

Jim laughed.

Perhaps not in his ceiling, but in the ceiling above the little sofa at Alice Harford's.

These lapses of humour jarred a little, and I was glad when he lowered his eyes from the ceiling and remained quite still considering the picture of the nymph and the satyr, and I thrilled again when he said, That picture has all the beauties of Raphael and other beauties besides. In youth one likes exaggeration, and in response to my cry for Art Jim said: If you want to learn painting you must go to France.

His words were like All ashore; the vessel moves away, but so slowly that one does not feel it is moving, and three weeks after my arrival in Paris I wrote to Jim from the Hôtel Voltaire, Quai Voltaire, asking him if he would come over and stay with me; I had a room which I did not use and he was welcome to it. But he wrote saying that he could not come over to Paris at present; and I was very much hurt by his ironical thanks for the room which I could not use. But it is the room that one does not use one offers a friend, not one's own bedroom, I said, and continued to consider his rude letter, wondering what had provoked it, without being able to discover any reason. Some months later he wrote again, this time in French, and to prove to mes camarades d'atelier that it was possible for an Englishman to write French I took the letter out of my pocket, and while they scanned it, picking out the English locutions, it struck me that if Jim was mistaken about his French he might well be mistaken about his pictures. And to convince myself of their worth I described the compositions to Julian—Julius Caesar Overturning the Altar of the Druids, The Bridal of Triermain, Cain Shielding his Wife from Wild Beasts—and Julian listened indulgently over many cups of coffee. He was becoming my intimate friend, allowing me to take him out to dinner and to treat him to the theatre; I was a little personage in his circle when a tall young man came into the studio late one afternoon—Lewis Welden Hawkins it was—and as we went with him to the café to drink a bowl of punch (the custom of the studio was that every new-comer should stand a bowl of punch), he turned and spoke to me in English, asking me, after a few remarks, if we had not met in Jim Browne's studio.

The name of Jim Browne carried me back to Prince's Gardens and to the moment when Jim introduced me to a tall young man whom I did not altogether like, so contemptuous was he of Jim's genius, and of me when I invited him to come forward and tell me what he thought of Cain Shielding his Wife from Wild Beasts. He was Jim's cousin, and therefore in a roundabout way my cousin; he had come over to London with a young Frenchwoman whom he called Louise, and I remembered Jim saying: I hope you have turned out something, meaning that he hoped that Lewis had painted a picture, for he had left the Navy to study painting; but the young man had answered, I don't know if I have turned out anything, but I have turned up a good deal, an answer which displeased me. There was no time to remember any more. We had arrived at the café; the conversation had become general, and the first thing that was borne in upon me was that Lewis spoke French like a Frenchman; his thoughts moved in the language, which was not extraordinary, since he was born in Brussels, and when we returned to the studio the whole studio gathered about his easel and admired his audacity, for he had sketched in the model and the entire background—the stove that kept the model warm, the screen behind which he dressed and undressed, and the yellow curtain which sheltered him from draughts. The elders, Renouf and Boutet de Monvel, saw through Lewis's facility; to them it was merely du chic, Ignorance giving itself airs, but to me who could not express myself at all, and who spent a whole week stuttering and stammering through a wretched drawing, the hour's work on Lewis's canvas was almost as wonderful as one of Jim's pictures.

His manners were winning and easy; he crossed the studio with a deference proper in a new-comer, and seating himself in front of my drawing he advised me. And at five o'clock, when the studio closed, we went away together in a carriage, for he wanted to show me his studio, which was far away behind the Gare du Nord, too far to walk; moreover he was in a hurry. But he seemed to forget his hurry when we reached the Place Maubeuge, remembering suddenly that he had to see Louise, who lived in the Rue Maubeuge. And it being always pleasant to see a woman, I was disappointed when the concierge said that Madame was not at home. But another friend of his lived up the street. She was not at home either, so he scribbled a note in the concierge's lodge, and bethought himself of another. She too was out; mais si monsieur veut monter ... la bonne est en haute. No, he was in a hurry. He scribbled another note; we dashed into the cab again. But he must speak with—We jumped out, and in the middle of a low-ceilinged room he engaged in conversation with a lady who came from her bedroom somewhat flurried in a peignoir. She spoke to me in English, but as soon as she turned to Lewis she dropped into French, which she seemed to speak very well, for I noticed that instead of saying Vous avez tort, as I should have said, she said Je vous donne tort, a phrase which I did not know and kept chewing all the way to his studio, while he confided to me that he was now living with an English girl who had come over with a theatrical company to Brussels. He was expecting her to call for him, so there was female society to look forward to, and the carriage drew up at the door of the house in which he was living.

You won't have to go up many stairs. I am on the entresol, he said. His studio was a large room with a great fireplace, in which he had hung an iron pot on a chain. The fireplace had cost seven hundred and fifty francs; seven hundred and fifty francs represented no actual sum of money to me; it was a pitiful thing to have to turn francs into pounds and to have to ask if any cooking was done in the pot, for of course I should have known that the pot and chain were decorative effect, as were the Turkish lamps and draperies, as indeed everything in the room was, including Lewis himself, especially when he took a fiddle from the wall and began playing.

Stradella's Chant d'Église—do you know it?

Alas! I didn't, and after hearing it my wonderment increased, for Lewis said that he did not know a note of music, but had met a vagrant once and had picked up some knowledge of the fiddle in half an hour. He soon wearied of the fiddle, and going to a small organ he strummed snatches of Verdi's Requiem, till a young girl entered the room out of breath.

Lewis!

She stopped suddenly on seeing me, and turning his head he introduced me to a beautiful girl, and one in the bloom of her first beauty, a tall girl of seventeen or eighteen, with brown eyes and fair hair. She had come to fetch Lewis to dinner, and it occurred to me that she might be disappointed at finding me with Lewis. But he assured me they would be glad of my company if I didn't mind dining at Alphonsine's. Not the least. But who was Alphonsine? An old light-o'-love, he said, who gathered all her friends around her table d'hôte, at three francs and a half. His supercilious style delighted me, and he left me talking to Alice while he crossed the street to order some coals at the charbonnerie, and he looked such a fine fellow, as he stepped from one paving-stone to the other, that Alice could not restrain her admiration.

What a toff he is!

A toff he was, not a tailor's toff, but one of Nature's toffs, a tall, thin young man and yet powerful, his long arms could no doubt deal a swinging blow on occasions, and in a race his long legs would have carried him past many a competitor. His shoulders were ample, and his small face was not spoilt by a broken nose. He must have told me how his nose was broken; I have forgotten; but in my memory of him it contrasts happily with the soft violet eyes, giving character to the face—a face which absorbed and interested me all the evening, my eyes returning to him again and again as he leaned across the table telling stories in fluent French, delighting everybody, the men as well as the women, assembled under the awning.

What is he saying? Alice asked me. I could not tell her, alas! He thinks he is such a fine man that all he would have to do would be to strip himself naked and walk into a woman's room for her to fall down and adore him.

I begged her to tell me about Marie Pellegrin.

You admire her, don't you? Well, she'll cost you a thousand francs; but if you were a voyou—

What's a voyou?

A cad—you could have her for nothing.

And if she is rich why does she come here? Are all the women here worth a thousand francs?

Alice laughed scornfully and broke off the conversation, and applied herself to trying to understand what Lewis was saying.

I wonder why she came here. She must have left the Grand Duke.

What Grand Duke?

All dukes are the same. Do hold your tongue.

Lewis told me afterwards that Marie had been to Russia and had had hundreds of thousands of francs from the Grand Duke, but she liked les voyous du quartier better, and returned to them when she was bored. She had just come back from Russia and was spending her earnings in the Rue Breda, and, intoxicated with the romance of the story, I begged of Lewis to tell me more about her. But he had told me all he knew, and Alice sat very much annoyed, for she was just as pretty a girl as Marie Pellegrin, and if she had had the luck to be introduced to Grand Dukes she would know how to put her money to better use.

We were in a victoria, for Lewis had proposed an excursion to Bullier, and a train of cabs crossed Paris, over the bridge down the Rue du Bac and round the Luxembourg. But I cannot write with the same insight and sympathy of the Bal Bullier as I did of the Élysée Montmartre, in the story entitled The End of Marie Pellegrin. I am a Montmartre kin, and Bullier, unhallowed by memories, rises up a mere externality, a crowd pushing through the tables and chairs set under trees, sweating waiters doing their best, and the band under cover, a sort of exaggerated shed into which one walked from the garden. I never danced at Bullier, and it matters little to me that the finest can-can dancers assembled there; polkas and waltzes were looked upon as a kind of waste of time, but the moment the band struck up a quadrille, a crowd formed in dense rings, and the merits of the kickers were discussed as eagerly as the toreadors in Madrid and Seville. The grisettes of the quarter advanced kicking furiously, and about one in the morning the company separated through the Latin Quarter, the Montmartrians returning by themselves, for nothing was more rare than for a Montmartrian to bring a grisette back with him, the girls being with one accord faithful to their quarter.

Lewis and Alice dropped me at the Hôtel de Russie, going on themselves to the Rue St Denis, somewhere between the Boulevard Sebastopol and the Gare du Nord, I think. My last words to him were, You'll be sure to be at the studio tomorrow, for I was anxious that Julian should see my cousin's picture, and I can see myself still bringing him round to Lewis's easel. An instinctive fellow Julian was, divining at once a useful ally in Lewis, and, to make sure of him, Julian proposed a few weeks later that we—Lewis, myself, Julian, Renouf, Boutet de Monvel, and a few others—should take the first boat next Sunday morning to Bas Meudon. The landscape painters, he said, would find some pretty motives along the banks of the Seine; the others could go for a walk, and I remember that Renouf and Boutet de Monvel went off together, and returned an hour later saying that they had found nothing that tempted them. Whereas Lewis had been immediately struck by the picturesque ascension of the staircase leading up from the river to the village. Was it jealousy that stayed them from admiring his facility? I asked myself, for they did not seem to admire the picture that Lewis had nearly completed on a panel; bestowing only a casual glance at it, they began to talk about breakfast; but Lewis could not be persuaded to lay aside his palette overflowing with bitumen and cadmium yellow; he continued to add bits of drawing, and I to admire the perspective and to wonder how he did it; Alice watched him from under her sunshade, and Julian caught my serious attention when he said: All that facility will go for nothing if he doesn't come to work at the studio. We found the others waiting for us at the door of the restaurant, very impatient, and to my delight our table was laid under a trellis, and the green leaves and the white table appealed to my imagination and the cutlets and the omelettes linger in my memory, and the races that we ran in the evening when the bats came out, Lewis beating me a little in one race, for his legs were longer, but only just beating me, whereupon one whose name I cannot recall challenged me to race him for a bottle of champagne, and Lewis whispered, Take him on; you'll run away from him. And to my surprise Lewis's judgment turned out right; my competitor gave up after a few yards, we drank his champagne, and the boat took us back to Paris, all a little conscious that the last lights of a happy day were dying—a day that I felt I should never forget. We shall be thinking of this day when we are old men, I said to Lewis, and was ashamed for a moment of my emotion. He had not heard, he was talking to Alice. The night gathered about the green banks of the Seine, and the dim poplars struck through the last bar of light which seemed as if it could not die; the month being June, it lingered between grey clouds till the boat had passed under the first bridge....

And then, bridge after bridge, the landing, the separations, each one returning to his bed, his mind filled with remembrances of blue air, and flowing water, and swaying trees. Did Alice return with Lewis? I think so. She was certainly with us a few weeks later, for Lewis had caught sight of a picturesque corner, and was full of scorn of Renouf and Boutet de Monvel who had missed it, and we three returned to Bas Meudon for Lewis to paint it. But the Seine was so sunny the morning we arrived that a swim suggested itself to Lewis, and a boat was hired, and a boatman rowed us to the near side of an island. Alice, who could not swim at all, remained in the shallows with me, who could swim only a little, and splashing about together we watched Lewis disporting himself in mid-stream, breasting the current, head upreared, turning over on his side and rushing through the water like some great fish. We admired him until he passed behind the island; and then Alice would have me teach her to swim. We were getting on nicely when, in sport, I threatened to duck her. She screamed to me to let her go, and as soon as I lost hold of her she went under, coming up unconscious, though she had not been under the water for more than a few seconds. The boatmen came to my assistance quickly, and Lewis came swimming by, and together we got her into the boat. Good God, Lewis, try to bring her to, I cried, falling on my knees beside her, terribly frightened, for Lewis was so angry with me that I could not doubt that he would pitch me into the river if he failed to revive her. At last she opened her eyes, and after a tender scene between her and Lewis, we rowed back to the inn, where her beauty inspired much commiseration.

A day has been wasted, Lewis said, for his mind was fixed upon the corner he had selected, and he went away next morning without me, the boat not being large enough to hold two painters. You don't want to paint. You had better remain and talk to Alice. But it was impossible to persuade Alice out of her bed, and feeling, I suppose, that I was as negligible a quantity in love as in art she invited me, after some hesitation, into her room; and we used to gossip there every morning when Lewis went away to paint until gossip busied itself with us, and one day he told us that he was returning to Paris next day. We could see that something had gone wrong, and at last we got the truth out of him. People at the inn had begun to notice that I went into Alice's room as soon as he went out painting. Alice lost her temper quickly; I protested, and Lewis said: Of course I know she wouldn't have anything to do with you; all the same, I don't wish to pass for a cuckold. A very rude answer I felt this to be, but held my tongue, and we returned to Paris next day, all three rather angry and disappointed, and Lewis discouraged for his picture had not turned out well; it had, indeed, turned out so badly that landscape painting was not mentioned again that summer. And it was not until the fall that he began to speak of Cernay, a beautiful country celebrated among painters, not more than fifty or sixty kilometres from Paris. His suggestion was that we might go there for a week, and I consented, for I wanted to see the inn whose walls had been decorated by every painter that had stayed there—by every man of talent—for this inn-keeper would not hand over his walls to be daubed by me and my like. And wondering if Lewis were trying to fool me, or if it were really true that Cernay was a relic of the Middle Ages that had escaped civilisation, I asked him if he proposed to pay his bill with a picture, and if the inn-keeper would accept poems from me in exchange for what I owed him. You see now I have told you the truth, he said as soon as we entered the inn, and I looked round the rooms seeing every subject that had ever been treated dashed here and there: seascapes, horses ploughing, battle-pieces, ravens, parrots, ladies in their shifts amid pillows, swine on the hillside, and herds of cattle winding through fields, a birchen wood showing aloft on a hillside which Lewis said was worth all the other pictures put together, and he mentioned the name of the painter of a large flowerpiece, and we should have admired his peonies longer if the inn-keeper had not been at our heels waiting for us to choose our rooms. It may have been for reasons of economy that we elected to sleep in the same room. It may have been that the inn-keeper had only one room to offer us. For good or evil reasons we slept in the same room, of that I am sure, for I was awakened in the middle of the night by Lewis trying to find matches to light a candle. He was going into the backyard. A dog began to bark, and Alice sat up quaking, beseeching me to go to Lewis's help and save him from being devoured. It seemed to me that I had better waken the inn-keeper, and, while I was standing in the middle of the floor wondering what had better be done, Lewis returned. The dog had rushed at him, but fortunately was on a chain.

But, Lewis, if you had been within reach, or if the chain had snapped!

And the depth of her passion may be judged from the discussion that arose between her and me as to what one would do if one had to eat something incredibly nasty. Alice's point was that it mattered a great deal from whence the nastiness came; if it came from Lewis she would sooner eat a pound than a pinch if it came from me, and she woke up Lewis to ask him if he would not return her the compliment, and was very angry when he said that a crap was the same all the world over, and he would prefer to swallow a pinch rather than a pound, no matter who owned it.

We certainly pigged it together, pigs no doubt, but aspiring pigs, who went out in the morning to the borders of the lake to paint, Lewis able to get down a large willow-tree in the foreground, retaining some parts of the view, rejecting others, myself quite uninterested in trying to arrange the lake as Corot might have arranged it, but unable to express myself, fumbling with the beautiful outline of the shore, which I could not fit into the canvas, till Alice, who had not risen so early as we, came to meet us and joined in Lewis's criticism of my abortive drawings, giggling under her parasol and echoing Lewis's opinions.

Of course there must be a willow-tree and a man in a boat to make a picture. Give me your charcoal, and he began to recompose, bringing the edge of the wood into my canvas. Don't you see?

No, Lewis, I don't see; the edge of the wood doesn't come into my vision.

It should come in to make a picture; and he strove hard vulgarising what I had done, and doing this so successfully that in the end he had to hand me back my pencil, saying he was sorry, that perhaps it was better the way I had it. Alice did not think so, and we strolled over to admire Lewis's work, which captured all her admiration. I think that is how Corot would have seen it, he said, and we watched the slate-coloured lake amid its autumn tints and sedges, and returned to Paris a few days afterwards without a picture, to continue—

Good heavens! it is twelve o'clock, and I have been sitting here dreaming since ten! And my eyes went to the large fat volume on the table, not one line of which I had read.