Watson, however, having started a subject which he well knew to be interminable, would instantly have liked to escape from it.  He was himself nervous, critical, and easily bored.  He did not know what he should do with Fenwick’s outpourings when he had listened to them.

But Fenwick had come over—­charged—­and Watson had touched the spring.  He sat there, smoking and declaiming, his eyes blazing, one hand playing with Watson’s favourite dog, an Aberdeen terrier who was softly smelling and pushing against him.  All that litany of mockery and bitterness, which the Comic Spirit kindles afresh on the lips of each rising generation, only to quench it again on the lips of those who ‘arrive,’ flowed from him copiously.  He was the age indeed for ‘arrival,’ when, as so often happens, the man of middle life, appeased by success, dismisses the revolts of his youth.  But this was still the language—­and the fierce language—­of revolt!  The decadence of English art and artists, the miserable commercialism of the Academy, the absence of any first-rate teaching, of any commanding traditions, of any ‘school’ worth the name—­the vulgarity of the public, from royalty downward, the snobbery of the rich world in its dealings with art:  all these jeremiads which he recited were much the same—­mutatis mutandis—­as those with which, half a century before, poor Benjamin Haydon had filled the ‘autobiography’ which is one of the capital ‘documents’ of the artistic life.  This very resemblance, indeed, occurred to Watson.

‘Upon my word,’ he said, with a queer smile, ’you remind me of Haydon.’

Fenwick started; with an impatient movement he pushed away the dog, who whimpered.

‘Oh, come—­I hope it’s not as bad as that,’ he said, roughly.

Watson sharply regretted his remark.  Through the minds of both there passed the same image of Haydon lying dead by his own hand beneath the vast pictures that no one would buy.

‘Why you talk like this, I’m sure I don’t know,’ Watson said, with an impatient laugh.  ’I’m always seeing your name in the papers.  You have a great reputation, and I don’t expect the Academy matters to your clientele.’

Fenwick shook his head.  ’I haven’t sold a picture for more than a year—­except a beastly portrait—­one of the worst things I ever did.’

‘That’s bad,’ said Watson.  ’Of course that’s my state—­perennially!  But you’re not used to it.’

Fenwick said nothing, and the delicate sensibility of the other instantly divined that, friends as they were, the comparison with himself had not been at all welcome to his companion.  And, indeed, at the time when Watson left England to begin the wandering life he had been leading for some three years, it would have been nothing less than grotesque.  Fenwick was then triumphant, in what, it was supposed, would be his ’first period’—­that ‘young man’s success,’ brilliant, contested, noisy, from which, indeed, many roads lead,