Cuningham stood beside him, embarrassed.

‘It’s full of fine things,’ he said, after a moment.  ‘But—­’

‘You wish I wouldn’t paint such damned depressing subjects?’

’I wish you’d sometimes condescend to think of the public, old fellow!’

‘That—­never!’ said the other, under his breath.  ’Starve—­and please yourself!  But I shan’t starve—­you forget that.’

‘Worse luck!’ laughed Cuningham.  ’I believe Providence ordained the British Philistine for our good—­drat him!  It does no one any harm to have to hook the public.  All the great men have done it.  You’re too squeamish, Master Dick!’

Watson went on painting in silence, his lips working.  Presently Cuningham caught—­half lost in the beard—­’There’s a public of to-day, though—­and a public of to-morrow!’

‘Oh, all right,’ said Philip.  ’So long as you take a public of some sort into consideration!  I like your jester.’

He bent forward to look into the front line of the large composition crowded with life-size figures on which Watson was engaged.  It was an illustration of some Chaucerian lines, describing the face of a man on his way to execution, seen among a crowd: 

  ’a pale face
  Among a press ...’

so stricken that, amid all the thronging multitude, ’men might know his face that was bestead’ from all the rest.

The idea—­of helpless pain, in the grip of cruel and triumphant force—­had been realised with a passionate wealth of detail, comparable to some of the early work of Holman Hunt.  The head of the victim bound with blood-stained linen, a frightened girl hiding her eyes, a mother weeping, a jester with the laugh withered on his lip by this sudden vision of death and irremediable woe—­and in the distance a frail, fainting form, sweetheart or sister—­each figure and group, rendered often with very unequal technical merit, had yet in it something harshly, intolerably true.  The picture was too painful to be borne; but it was neither common nor mean.

Cuningham turned away from it with a shudder.

’Some of it’s magnificent, Dick—­but I couldn’t live with it if you paid me!’

‘Because you look at it wrongly,’ said Watson, gruffly.  ’You take it as an anecdote.  It isn’t an anecdote—­it’s a symbol.’

’What?—­The World?—­and The Victim?—­from all time?—­and to all time?  Well, that makes it more gruesome than ever.  Hullo, who’s that?  Come in!’

The door opened.  A young man, in some embarrassment, appeared on the threshold.

‘I believe these letters are yours,’ he said, offering a couple to Cuningham.  ‘They brought them up to me by mistake.’

Philip Cuningham took them with thanks, then scanned the newcomer as he was turning to depart.

‘I think I saw you at Berners Street the other night?’

John Fenwick paused.

‘Yes—­’ he said, awkwardly.