alone and smoking, but I had come prepared against the contingency of
one of his cigars. They were the cigars of the man who doesn't know what
he eats. With sociable promptness I lighted one of my own. The little
enclosed veranda testified to a wave of fresh activity. The north light
streamed in upon two or three fresh canvases, the place seemed full of
enthusiasm, and you could see its source, at present quiescent under the
influence of tobacco, in Armour's face.

'You have taken a new line,' I said, pointing to a file of camels, still
half obscured by the dust of the day, coming along a mountain road
under a dim moon. They might have been walking through time and through
history. It was a queer, simple thing, with a world of early Aryanism in
it.

'Does that say anything? I'm glad. It was to me articulate, but I didn't
know. Oh, things have been going well with me lately. Those two studies
over there simply did themselves. That camp scene on the left is almost
a picture. I think I'll put a little more work on it and give it a
chance in Paris. I got in once, you know. Champ de Mars. With some
horses.'

'Did you, indeed?' I said. 'Capital.' I asked him if he didn't
atrociously miss the life of the Quarter, and he surprised me by saying
that he never had lived it. He had been en pension instead with a dear
old professor of chemistry and his family at Puteaux, and used to go in
and out. A smile came into his eyes at the remembrance, and he told
me one after the other idyllic little stories of the old professor and
madame. Madame and the omelet--madame and the melon--M. Vibois and the
maire; I sat charmed. So long as we remained in France his humour was
like this, delicate and expansive, but an accidental allusion led us
across the Channel when he changed. He had no little stories of the
time he spent in England. Instead he let himself go in generalizations,
aimed, for they had a distinct animus, at English institutions and
character, particularly as these appear in English society. I could
not believe, from the little I had seen of him, that his experience of
English society of any degree had been intimate; what he said had the
flavour of Radical Sunday papers. The only original element was the
feeling behind, which was plainly part of him; speculation instantly
clamoured as to how far this was purely temperamental and how far the
result of painful contact. He himself, he said, though later of
the Western States, had