; they were
all of them young and ardent; and they had a habit of propounding
their views, which were always of the most advanced nature, with a
vehemence which to Rainham represented all the disinterestedness of
youth. Very often they were exceedingly well worth knowing, though
in the majority of cases the world had not found it out. He knew
very few of them personally; he had been taken there first by
Lightmark, when the latter was fresh from Paris, and had been
himself more in touch with them. But he had often sat smoking
silently a little outside the main group, listening, with a
deferential air that sat upon his age somewhat oddly, to their
audacious propaganda.

In his mind he would sometimes contrast the coterie with certain
artistic houses, more socially important, which he had from
time to time frequented: where earnest-eyed women in graceful
garments--which certainly afforded a rest to the eye--dispensed tea
from a _samovar_, and discoursed discreetly of the current Academy and
the most recent symptomatic novel.

The delight of a visible, orderly culture permeating their manners
and their conversation was a real one, and yet, Rainham reflected,
it left one at the last a trifle weary, a little cold. It seemed to
him that this restaurant, with its perennial smell of garlic, its
discoloured knife-handles, its frequentation of picturesque poverty,
possessed actually an horizon that was somewhat less limited.

Indeed, the dingy room, its assemblage apart, had many traces of an
artistic patronage. The rough walls were adorned, in imitation of
the familiar Roman haunt, of which this was, so to speak, a colony,
with a host of fantastic sketches: rapid silhouettes in charcoal,
drawn for illustration or refutation in the heat of some strenuous
argument; caricatures in the same medium, some of them trenchantly
like, of the customers as well as of certain artistic celebrities,
whose laurels Brodonowski's had not approved, varied here and there
by an epigram or a doggerel couplet, damning the Philistine.

Rainham smiled as he recognised occasionally the grotesque travesty
of a familiar face. Presently his eyes were arrested by a drawing
which was new to him, a face of striking ugliness, offering
advantages to the caricaturist of which, doubtless, he had not
omitted to avail himself. It imposed itself on Rainham, for the
savage strength which it displayed, and for an element in its
hideousness which suggested beauty.