ting-room with a bay-window facing Blackpool Reach, a room
filled with books that had no relation to shipping, and hung round
with etchings and pictures in those curiously-low tones for which he
had so unreasonable an affection--was what he cherished most in
London. He read little now, but the mere presence of the books he
loved best in rough, uneven cases, painted black, lining the walls,
caressed him. As with persons one has loved and grown used to
loving, it was not always needful that they should speak to him; it
was sufficient, simply, that they should be there. Neither did he
write on these long, interminable evenings, which were prolonged
sometimes far into the night. He had ended by being able to smile
at his literary ambitions of twenty, cultivating his indolence as
something choice and original, finding his destiny appropriate.

He spent the time in interminable reveries, sitting with a volume
before him, as often as not unopened, smoking incessantly, and
looking out of the window. The habit amused himself at times; it was
so eminently symbolic of his destiny. Life, after all, had been to
him nothing so much as that--a long looking out of window, the
impartial spectatorship of a crowd of persons and passions from
which he had come at last to seem strangely detached, almost as
much as from this chameleon river, which he had observed with such
satisfaction in all its manifold gradations of character and colour;
its curious cold grayness in the beginning of an autumnal dawn; the
illusion of warmth and depth which it sustained at noon, bringing
up its burden of leviathans on the top of the flood; its sheen on
moonless nights, when only little punctures, green and red and
orange, and its audible stillness, reminded him that down in the
obscurity the great polluted stream stole on wearily, monotonously,
everlastingly to the sea. It was changeful and changeless. He
thought he knew its effects by heart, but it had always new ones in
reserve to surprise and delight him. He declared it at last to be
inexhaustible. It was like a diamond on sunny days, flashing out
light in every little ripple; in the late, sunless afternoon the
light lay deeply within it, and it seemed jealous of giving back the
least particle. He compared it then to an opal or a sapphire, which
shine with the same parsimonious radiance.

One night, while he sat smoking in his wonted meditative fashion,
he had a visitor--the painter Oswyn. He had almos