at in
order to effect his final shipment to other shores I should be compelled
to lend him some more money. In the far future, when he should be famous
and I an obscure pauper on pension, my generous imagination permitted me
to see the loan repaid; but not till then. These are perhaps stereotyped
and conventional lines to conceive him on, but I hardly think that
anybody who has followed my little account to this point will think them
unjustifiable. I looked at his cheque with disgust. That a man turns out
better than you expected is no reason why you such not be annoyed that
your conception of him is shattered. You may be gratified on general
grounds, but distinctly put out on personal ones, especially when your
conception pointed to his inevitable removal. That was the way I felt.

The cheque stood for so much more than its money value. It stood for a
possible, nay, a probable capacity in Armour to take his place in the
stable body of society, to recognize and make demands, to become a
taxpayer, a churchgoer, a householder, a husband. As I gazed, the
signature changed from that of a gnome with luminous eyes who inhabited
an inaccessible crag among the rhododendrons to that of a prosperous
artist-bourgeois with a silk hat for Sundays. I have in some small
degree the psychological knack, I saw the possibilities of the situation
with immense clearness; and I cursed the cheque.

Coincidence is odious, tells on the nerves. I never felt it more so than
a week later, when I read in the 'Pioneer' the announcement of the death
of my old friend Fry, Superintendent of the School of Art in Calcutta.
The paragraph in which the journal dismissed poor Fry to his reward was
not unkind, but it distinctly implied that the removal of Fry should
include the removal of his ideas and methods, and the substitution of
something rather more up to date. It remarked that the Bengali student
had been pinned down long enough to drawing plaster casts, and declared
that something should be done to awake within him the creative idea. I
remember the phrase, it seemed so directly to suggest that the person to
awake it should be Ingersoll Armour.

I turned the matter over in my mind; indeed, for the best part of an
hour my brain revolved with little else. The billet was an excellent
one, with very decent pay and charming quarters. It carried a pension,
it was the completest sort of provision. There was a long vacation, with
opportunities for original