ter all, it was rather a compliment she was paying you."

"That sort of thing makes me sick," he said roughly.

I looked at him curiously. There was a real distaste in his
face, and yet it was the face of a coarse and sensual man.
I suppose the girl had been attracted by a certain brutality in it.

"I could have got all the women I wanted in London. I didn't
come here for that."

Chapter XIV

During the journey back to England I thought much of
Strickland. I tried to set in order what I had to tell his wife.
It was unsatisfactory, and I could not imagine that she
would be content with me; I was not content with myself.
Strickland perplexed me. I could not understand his motives.
When I had asked him what first gave him the idea of being a
painter, he was unable or unwilling to tell me. I could make
nothing of it. I tried to persuade myself than an obscure
feeling of revolt had been gradually coming to a head in his
slow mind, but to challenge this was the undoubted fact that
he had never shown any impatience with the monotony of his life.
If, seized by an intolerable boredom, he had determined
to be a painter merely to break with irksome ties, it would
have been comprehensible, and commonplace; but commonplace is
precisely what I felt he was not. At last, because I was
romantic, I devised an explanation which I acknowledged to be
far-fetched, but which was the only one that in any way
satisfied me. It was this: I asked myself whether there was
not in his soul some deep-rooted instinct of creation, which
the circumstances of his life had obscured, but which grew
relentlessly, as a cancer may grow in the living tissues,
till at last it took possession of his whole being and forced
him irresistibly to action. The cuckoo lays its egg in the
strange bird's nest, and when the young one is hatched it
shoulders its foster-brothers out and breaks at last the nest
that has sheltered it.

But how strange it was that the creative instinct should seize
upon this dull stockbroker, to his own ruin, perhaps, and to
the misfortune of such as were dependent on him; and yet no
stranger than the way in which the spirit of God has seized men,
powerful and rich, pursuing them with stubborn vigilance
till at last, conquered, they have abandoned the joy of the
world and the love of women for the painful austerities of
the cloister. Conversion may come under many shapes, and it may
be brought about in many ways. Wi