d done--just a note taken with a shaking hand, when he
was down in Devonshire recovering from a previous heart attack. Just a
note! But it tells his whole history. There are years of patient
scornful persistence in every line. A man who had swum with the current
could never have learned that mighty up-stream stroke....

"I turned back to my work, and went on groping and muddling; then I
looked at the donkey again. I saw that, when Stroud laid in the first
stroke, he knew just what the end would be. He had possessed his
subject, absorbed it, recreated it. When had I done that with any of my
things? They hadn't been born of me--I had just adopted them....

"Hang it, Rickham, with that face watching me I couldn't do another
stroke. The plain truth was, I didn't know where to put it--_I had
never known_. Only, with my sitters and my public, a showy splash of
colour covered up the fact--I just threw paint into their faces....
Well, paint was the one medium those dead eyes could see through--see
straight to the tottering foundations underneath. Don't you know how,
in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time
not what one wants to but what one can? Well--that was the way I
painted; and as he lay there and watched me, the thing they called my
'technique' collapsed like a house of cards. He didn't sneer, you
understand, poor Stroud--he just lay there quietly watching, and on his
lips, through the gray beard, I seemed to hear the question: 'Are you
sure you know where you're coming out?'

"If I could have painted that face, with that question on it, I should
have done a great thing. The next greatest thing was to see that I
couldn't--and that grace was given me. But, oh, at that minute,
Rickham, was there anything on earth I wouldn't have given to have
Stroud alive before me, and to hear him say: 'It's not too late--I'll
show you how'?

"It _was_ too late--it would have been, even if he'd been alive. I
packed up my traps, and went down and told Mrs. Stroud. Of course I
didn't tell her _that_--it would have been Greek to her. I simply said
I couldn't paint him, that I was too moved. She rather liked the
idea--she's so romantic! It was that that made her give me the donkey.
But she was terribly upset at not getting the portrait--she did so want
him 'done' by some one showy! At first I was afraid she wouldn't let me
off--and at my wits' end I suggested Grindle. Yes, it was I who started
Grindle: I told Mr