ajor's). He had had to find money in a hurry to pay off one of
these cursed things only the other day, and if he hadn't had the luck
to mention it to a friend, who was kind enough to come to the rescue
(of course on good security) the Major would have been in a hat, or a
hole, Larry couldn't quite read which.

These grievances, and much more, illegibly scrawled on foreign paper,
with a quill pen. Larry, swallowed up in the absorbing, isolating life
of a Paris studio, would put the letters half-read, in his pocket, and
would immediately forget all about them. After all, he couldn't
interfere with Barty; he was the man at the helm, and mustn't be
talked to. Also it was idiotic to keep a dog and bark yourself.
Proverbial philosophy is a recognised sedative; Larry gave himself a
dose or two, and straightway forgot Cousin Dick, forgot Ireland,
forgot even that gratifying nomination of himself as Nationalist
candidate for the Division, and plunged back into the burning
atmosphere of art, wherein models and professors, cliques and cabals,
glow, and seethe, and exist intensely, and with as little reference to
the affairs of the outside world, as if they were the sole occupants
of a distant and much over-heated star.

There are many people who have been endowed with one master-passion,
that "like Aaron's serpent swallows up the rest," but Larry's
ingenuous breast harboured a nest of such serpents. During his three
years at Oxford, he had stormed from one enthusiasm to another; he had
rowed, and boxed, and spouted politics, and, beginning with music, had
stormed on through poetry and the drama, to painting.

Having taken a moderate degree, he had rushed in pursuit of this
latest charmer to Paris, and the waters of the Quartier Latin then
closed over him. Occasionally a bubble would rise from those clouded
deeps, and a letter to Aunt Freddy, or to Barty Mangan, would briefly
announce his continued existence. Sometimes he wrote to Christian, and
would expand a little more to her; telling her of how one Professor
had remarked of his work that it was now _presque pas mal_, and
that this dizzying encomium had encouraged him to begin a _Salon_
(its subject described at length, with elucidatory sketches); further,
that he had taken a very jolly _atelier_, and "dear old Chose"
was "on the Jury," and would try and get him accepted, with much more
to the same effect, music, politics, horses and hounds, forgotten as
though they had never