and researches into Nature, without having prosecuted which no
watercolour artist ever puts brush to paper.

He was frequently, in fact, obliged to take his colour-box into the
Botanical Gardens, and there, on his stool, in the shade of a
monkey-puzzler or in the lee of some India-rubber plant, he would spend
long hours sketching.

An Art critic who had recently been looking at his work had delivered
himself as follows:

"In a way your drawings are very good; tone and colour, in some of them
certainly quite a feeling for Nature. But, you see, they're so
scattered; you'll never get the public to look at them. Now, if you'd
taken a definite subject, such as 'London by Night,' or 'The Crystal
Palace in the Spring,' and made a regular series, the public would have
known at once what they were looking at. I can't lay too much stress
upon that. All the men who are making great names in Art, like Crum
Stone or Bleeder, are making them by avoiding the unexpected; by
specializing and putting their works all in the same pigeon-hole, so that
the public know pat once where to go. And this stands to reason, for if
a man's a collector he doesn't want people to smell at the canvas to find
out whom his pictures are by; he wants them to be able to say at once, 'A
capital Forsyte!' It is all the more important for you to be careful to
choose a subject that they can lay hold of on the spot, since there's no
very marked originality in your style."

Young Jolyon, standing by the little piano, where a bowl of dried rose
leaves, the only produce of the garden, was deposited on a bit of faded
damask, listened with his dim smile.

Turning to his wife, who was looking at the speaker with an angry
expression on her thin face, he said:

"You see, dear?"

"I do not," she answered in her staccato voice, that still had a little
foreign accent; "your style has originality."

The critic looked at her, smiled' deferentially, and said no more. Like
everyone else, he knew their history.

The words bore good fruit with young Jolyon; they were contrary to all
that he believed in, to all that he theoretically held good in his Art,
but some strange, deep instinct moved him against his will to turn them
to profit.

He discovered therefore one morning that an idea had come to him for
making a series of watercolour drawings of London. How the idea had
arisen he could not tell; and it was not till the following year, when he
had completed and