cause I found, and still find, these easily outweighed by his good
and genuinely kindly qualities. His may not have been a very dignified
way of life; it was too full of affectations for that; particularly
after he began to be greatly influenced by the rather sickly aesthetic
movement then in vogue in London. But it was, at least, a harmless
life; and, upon the whole, a generous and kindly one.

Its influence upon me, for example, tended, I am sure, to give me a
pronounced distaste for the coarse and vulgar sort of dissipation
which very often engaged the leisure of my office companions, and
other youths of similar occupation in Sydney. It may be that the
causes behind my aloofness from mere vulgar frivolity, and worse, were
pretty mixed: part pride, or even conceit, and part prudence or
parsimony. No matter. The influence was helpful, for the abstention
was real, and the distaste grew always more rooted as time wore on.
Also, the same influence tended to make me more fastidious, more
critical, less crude than I might otherwise have been. It led me to
give more serious attention to pictures, music, and literature of the
less ephemeral sort than I might otherwise have given. It was not that
Mr. Rawlence and his friends advised one to study Shakespeare, or to
attend the better sort of concerts, or to learn something of art and
criticism. But talk that I heard in that studio did make me feel that
it was eminently desirable I should inform myself more fully in these
matters.

Listening to a discussion there of some quite worthless thing more
than once moved me to the investigation of something of real value. I
was still tolerably credulous, and when a man's casual reference
suggested that he and every one else was naturally intimate with this
or that, I would make it my business, so far as might be, really to
obtain some knowledge of the matter. I assumed, often quite
mistakenly, no doubt, that every one else present had this particular
knowledge. Thus the spirit of emulation helped me as it might never
have done but for Mr. Rawlence and his sumptuous studio, so rich in
everything save examples of his own work.

* * * * *

I fancy it must have been fully a year after my arrival in Sydney that
I met Mr. Foster, the editor of the _Chronicle_, as I was walking down
from Sussex Street to Circular Quay one evening.

'Ah, Freydon,' he said; 'what an odd coincidence! I was this moment
thinking of you, and of something you sa