were in the mood to sympathize with
Mr. Carville's doubt of modern tendencies. He stood by the door of the
studio, one hand on the jamb, the other under his coat, the plain gold
albert stretched across his broad person, the light shining on his
smooth pink forehead as he looked down at his crossed legs. It has
occurred to me from time to time that this unobtrusive man, with his
bizarre record and eccentric mentality, was evolving behind the mask of
his mediocrity a new type. That this process was only half deliberate I
am ready to believe. A man who disciplines his soul by flinging
overboard the manuscript of a book does not thereby slay his
imagination. He only drives it inward. When we first came to America we
planted all our seeds in the garden too deep and they grew downward,
assuming awful and grotesque forms. In some such way Mr. Carville's
imagination was working within him, fashioning, as I say, a new type. I
insist upon this, inasmuch as beyond it I have no mementoes of him. Both
he and his are gone from our immediate observation, and though we may
hear from him again, as a ship passing in the night, a rotund meditative
figure pacing the deck of some outbound freighter, so far I remember him
mainly by this intellectual inversion. For him the suppression of
passion had become a passion; for him individuality was cloaked by the
commonplace. In his way he made a contribution to art; he had hinted at
the possibilities underlying a new combination of human characters. He
had given strange hostages to Fortune, so that Fortune hardly knew what
to do with them. It is possible that the abrupt and dramatic
disappearance from his life (I refer to his brother) has slackened the
intensity of his hold upon this idea; but I do not know.

He left us that evening quietly and without fuss. He had, in a notable
degree, the neat movements and economy of gesture which I can imagine
indispensable to those who live in confined cabins and take their walks
upon decks beneath which their shipmates sleep. In a quiet indescribable
way there was manifest in his demeanour a gentle repudiation of all
things traditionally English. You could not possibly imagine him
vociferating "God save the King" or "Sons of the Sea." With a simple
dignity he had assumed the dun livery of the alien, and there was to me
a certain fineness in the sentiment that forbade any flaunting of his
nationality in the faces of his native-born children.

And in the mid