ng. He had been on the staff of an English
paper in Paris, but had been dismissed for drunkenness; he still however
did odd jobs for it, describing sales at the Hotel Drouot or the revues at
music-halls. The life of Paris had got into his bones, and he would not
change it, notwithstanding its squalor, drudgery, and hardship, for any
other in the world. He remained there all through the year, even in summer
when everyone he knew was away, and felt himself only at ease within a
mile of the Boulevard St. Michel. But the curious thing was that he had
never learnt to speak French passably, and he kept in his shabby clothes
bought at La Belle Jardiniere an ineradicably English appearance.

He was a man who would have made a success of life a century and a half
ago when conversation was a passport to good company and inebriety no bar.

"I ought to have lived in the eighteen hundreds," he said himself. "What
I want is a patron. I should have published my poems by subscription and
dedicated them to a nobleman. I long to compose rhymed couplets upon the
poodle of a countess. My soul yearns for the love of chamber-maids and the
conversation of bishops."

He quoted the romantic Rolla,

"Je suis venu trop tard dans un monde trop vieux."

He liked new faces, and he took a fancy to Philip, who seemed to achieve
the difficult feat of talking just enough to suggest conversation and not
too much to prevent monologue. Philip was captivated. He did not realise
that little that Cronshaw said was new. His personality in conversation
had a curious power. He had a beautiful and a sonorous voice, and a manner
of putting things which was irresistible to youth. All he said seemed to
excite thought, and often on the way home Lawson and Philip would walk to
and from one another's hotels, discussing some point which a chance word
of Cronshaw had suggested. It was disconcerting to Philip, who had a
youthful eagerness for results, that Cronshaw's poetry hardly came up to
expectation. It had never been published in a volume, but most of it had
appeared in periodicals; and after a good deal of persuasion Cronshaw
brought down a bundle of pages torn out of The Yellow Book, The
Saturday Review, and other journals, on each of which was a poem. Philip
was taken aback to find that most of them reminded him either of Henley or
of Swinburne. It needed the splendour of Cronshaw's delivery to make them
personal. He expressed his disappointment to Lawson, who