that Lawson was slightly awed by Hayward's elegant clothes and
grand manner. They sat upon him better than they had done in the shabby
little studio which Lawson and Philip had shared.

At dinner Lawson went on with his news. Flanagan had gone back to America.
Clutton had disappeared. He had come to the conclusion that a man had no
chance of doing anything so long as he was in contact with art and
artists: the only thing was to get right away. To make the step easier he
had quarrelled with all his friends in Paris. He developed a talent for
telling them home truths, which made them bear with fortitude his
declaration that he had done with that city and was settling in Gerona, a
little town in the north of Spain which had attracted him when he saw it
from the train on his way to Barcelona. He was living there now alone.

"I wonder if he'll ever do any good," said Philip.

He was interested in the human side of that struggle to express something
which was so obscure in the man's mind that he was become morbid and
querulous. Philip felt vaguely that he was himself in the same case, but
with him it was the conduct of his life as a whole that perplexed him.
That was his means of self-expression, and what he must do with it was not
clear. But he had no time to continue with this train of thought, for
Lawson poured out a frank recital of his affair with Ruth Chalice. She had
left him for a young student who had just come from England, and was
behaving in a scandalous fashion. Lawson really thought someone ought to
step in and save the young man. She would ruin him. Philip gathered that
Lawson's chief grievance was that the rupture had come in the middle of a
portrait he was painting.

"Women have no real feeling for art," he said. "They only pretend they
have." But he finished philosophically enough: "However, I got four
portraits out of her, and I'm not sure if the last I was working on would
ever have been a success."

Philip envied the easy way in which the painter managed his love affairs.
He had passed eighteen months pleasantly enough, had got an excellent
model for nothing, and had parted from her at the end with no great pang.

"And what about Cronshaw?" asked Philip.

"Oh, he's done for," answered Lawson, with the cheerful callousness of his
youth. "He'll be dead in six months. He got pneumonia last winter. He was
in the English hospital for seven weeks, and when he came out they told
him his only chance was to