or nearly, was pale from other causes,
and it was a different kind of paleness; not bloodlessness, like Amadis,
but something lacking in the blood, a vitiated state. Too much Fleet
Street, in short; too much of the Oracle--Pantagruel's Oracle of the
Bottle.

His hands shook as he held his knife and fork--oddly enough, the hands
of great genius often do shake; now and then when he put his glass to
his lips, his teeth snapped on it, and chinked.

It seemed curious that such puffy, shaky hands could hold a pencil, and
draw delicate lines without a flaw.

Many who never resort to the Oracle have hands that tremble nearly as
much--the nervous constitution--and yet execute artists' work of rare
excellence.

Alere's constitution, the Flamma constitution, naturally nervous, had
been shaken as with dynamite by the bottle, and the glass chinked
against his teeth. Every two or three years, when he felt himself
toppling over like a tree half sawn through, Alere packed his
carpet-bag, and ran down to Coombe Oaks. When the rats began to run up
the wall as he sat at work in broad daylight, Alere put his slippers
into his carpet-bag and looked out some collars.

In London he never wore a collar, only a bright red scarf round his
neck; the company he kept would have shunned him--they would have looked
him up and down disdainfully:--"Got a collar on--had no breakfast." They
would have scornfully regarded him as no better than a City clerk, the
class above all others scorned by those who use tools.

"Got a collar on--had no breakfast." The City clerk, playing the Masher
on thirty shillings a week, goes without food to appear the gentleman.

Alere, the artist, drank with the men who used hammer, and file, or set
up type--a godless set, ye gods, how godless, these setters up of type
at four o'clock in the morning; oysters and stout at 4 a.m.; special
taverns they must have open for them--open before Aurora gleams in the
east--Oh! Fleet Street, Fleet Street, what a place it is!

By no possible means could Alere work himself into a dress-coat.

Could he have followed the celebrated advice--"You put on a dress-coat
and go into society"--he would soon have become a name, a fame, a taker
of big fees, a maker of ten thousand yearly.

To a man who could draw like Alere, possessed, too, of the still rarer
talent--the taste to see what to draw--there really is no limit in our
days; for as for colour, you do not require a genius for colou