ffection.

The young men came and went at their ease in and out of that house in
St. John's Wood which Lawrence Stephen shared with Vera Harrison. They
were at home there. Their books stood in his bookcase; they laid their
manuscripts on his writing table and left them there; they claimed his
empty spaces for the hanging of their pictures yet unsold.

Every Friday evening they met together in the long, low room at the top
of the house, and they talked.

Every Friday evening Michael left his father's house to meet them there,
and to listen and to talk.

To-night, round and about Morton Ellis, the young poet, were Austen
Mitchell, the young painter, and Paul Monier-Owen, the young sculptor,
and George Wadham, the last and youngest of Morton Ellis's disciples.

Lawrence Stephen stood among them like an austere guest in some
rendezvous of violent youth, or like the priest of some romantic
religion that he has blasphemed yet not quite abjured. He was lean and
dark and shaven; his black hair hung forward in two masses, smooth and
straight and square; he had sorrowful, bitter eyes, and a bitter,
sorrowful mouth, the long Irish upper lip fine and hard drawn, while the
lower lip quivered incongruously, pouted and protested and recanted, was
sceptical and sensitive and tender. His short, high nose had wide yet
fastidious nostrils.

It was at this figure that Morton Ellis continued to gaze with
affability and irritation. It was this figure that Vera's eyes followed
with anxious, restless passion, as if she felt that at any moment he
might escape her, might be off, God knew where.

Lawrence Stephen was ill at ease in that house and in the presence of
his mistress and his friends.

"I believe in the past," he said, "because I believe in the future. I
want continuity. Therefore I believe in Swinburne; and I believe in
Browning and in Tennyson and Wordsworth; I believe in Keats and Shelley
and in Milton. But I do not believe, any more than you do, in their
imitators. I believe in destroying their imitators. I do not believe in
destroying them."

"You can't destroy their imitators unless you destroy them. They breed
the disgusting parasites. Their memories harbour them like a stinking
suit of old clothes. They must be scrapped and burned if we're to get
rid of the stink. Art has got to be made young and new and clean. There
isn't any disinfectant that'll do the trick. So long as old masters are
kow-towed to as masters people