us play the divine comedy of
love."

"Fichez-moi la paix," she said, and pushing him on one side continued
her perambulation.

"Art," he continued, with a wave of the hand, "is merely the refuge which
the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women,
to escape the tediousness of life."

Cronshaw filled his glass again, and began to talk at length. He spoke
with rotund delivery. He chose his words carefully. He mingled wisdom and
nonsense in the most astounding manner, gravely making fun of his hearers
at one moment, and at the next playfully giving them sound advice. He
talked of art, and literature, and life. He was by turns devout and
obscene, merry and lachrymose. He grew remarkably drunk, and then he began
to recite poetry, his own and Milton's, his own and Shelley's, his own and
Kit Marlowe's.

At last Lawson, exhausted, got up to go home.

"I shall go too," said Philip.

Clutton, the most silent of them all, remained behind listening, with a
sardonic smile on his lips, to Cronshaw's maunderings. Lawson accompanied
Philip to his hotel and then bade him good-night. But when Philip got to
bed he could not sleep. All these new ideas that had been flung before him
carelessly seethed in his brain. He was tremendously excited. He felt in
himself great powers. He had never before been so self-confident.

"I know I shall be a great artist," he said to himself. "I feel it in me."

A thrill passed through him as another thought came, but even to himself
he would not put it into words:

"By George, I believe I've got genius."

He was in fact very drunk, but as he had not taken more than one glass of
beer, it could have been due only to a more dangerous intoxicant than
alcohol.

XLIII

On Tuesdays and Fridays masters spent the morning at Amitrano's,
criticising the work done. In France the painter earns little unless he
paints portraits and is patronised by rich Americans; and men of
reputation are glad to increase their incomes by spending two or three
hours once a week at one of the numerous studios where art is taught.
Tuesday was the day upon which Michel Rollin came to Amitrano's. He was an
elderly man, with a white beard and a florid complexion, who had painted
a number of decorations for the State, but these were an object of
derision to the students he instructed: he was a disciple of Ingres,
impervious to the progress of art and angrily impatient with that tas de
farceurs w