work
after putting her into her carriage, and otherwise bare-headedly
manifesting, the last time, for that year apparently, that he was to see
her--when she had left him it occurred to him in the light of her quick
distinction that there were deep differences in the famous artistic
life. Miriam was already in a glow of glory--which, moreover, was
probably but a faint spark in relation to the blaze to come; and as he
closed the door on her and took up his palette to rub it with a dirty
cloth the little room in which his own battle was practically to be
fought looked woefully cold and grey and mean. It was lonely and yet at
the same time was peopled with unfriendly shadows--so thick he foresaw
them gather in winter twilights to come--the duller conditions, the
longer patiences, the less immediate and less personal joys. His late
beginning was there and his wasted youth, the mistakes that would still
bring forth children after their image, the sedentary solitude, the grey
mediocrity, the poor explanations, the effect of foolishness he dreaded
even from afar of in having to ask people to wait, and wait longer, and
wait again, for a fruition which to their sense at least might well
prove a grotesque anti-climax. He yearned enough over it, however it
should figure, to feel that this possible pertinacity might enter into
comparison even with such a productive force as Miriam's. That was after
all in his bare studio the most collective dim presence, the one that
kept him company best as he sat there and that made it the right place,
however wrong--the sense that it was to the thing in itself he was
attached. This was Miriam's case too, but the sharp contrast, which she
showed him she also felt, was in the number of other things she got with
the thing in itself.

I hasten to add that our young man had hours when this last mystic value
struck him as requiring for its full operation no adjunct whatever--as
being in its own splendour a summary of all adjuncts and apologies. I
have related that the great collections, the National Gallery and the
Museum, were sometimes rather a series of dead surfaces to him; but the
sketch I have attempted of him will have been inadequate if it fails to
suggest that there were other days when, as he strolled through them, he
plucked right and left perfect nosegays of reassurance. Bent as he was
on working in the modern, which spoke to him with a thousand voices, he
judged it better for long periods