There was not the least resemblance between Lawrence Stephen as he was in himself and Lawrence Stephen as he appeared to the generation just behind him.  To conservatives he passed for the leader of the revolution in contemporary art, and yet the revolution in contemporary art was happening without him.  He was not the primal energy in the movement of the Vortex.  In nineteen-thirteen his primal energies were spent, and he was trusting to the movement of the Vortex to carry him a little farther than he could have gone by his own impetus.  He was attracted to the young men of the Vortex because they were not of the generation that had rejected him, and because he hoped thus to prolong indefinitely his own youth.  They were attracted to him because of his solitary distinction, his comparative poverty, and his unpopularity.  A prosperous, well-established Stephen would have revolted them.  He gave the revolutionaries the shelter of his Review, the support of his name, and the benefit of his bored and wearied criticism.  They brought him in return a certain homage founded on his admirable appreciation of their merits and tempered by their sense of his dealings with the past they abominated.

“Stephen is a bigot,” said young Morton Ellis; “he believes in Swinburne.”

Stephen smiled at him in bored and weary tolerance.

He believed in too many things for his peace of mind.  He knew that the young men distrusted him because of his beliefs, and because of his dealings with the past; because he refused to destroy the old gods when he made place for the new.

* * * * *

Young Morton Ellis lay stretched out at his ease on the couch in Stephen’s study.

He blinked and twitched as he looked up at his host with half irritated, half affable affection.

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.