These grievances, and much more, illegibly scrawled on foreign paper, with a quill pen.  Larry, swallowed up in the absorbing, isolating life of a Paris studio, would put the letters half-read, in his pocket, and would immediately forget all about them.  After all, he couldn’t interfere with Barty; he was the man at the helm, and mustn’t be talked to.  Also it was idiotic to keep a dog and bark yourself.  Proverbial philosophy is a recognised sedative; Larry gave himself a dose or two, and straightway forgot Cousin Dick, forgot Ireland, forgot even that gratifying nomination of himself as Nationalist candidate for the Division, and plunged back into the burning atmosphere of art, wherein models and professors, cliques and cabals, glow, and seethe, and exist intensely, and with as little reference to the affairs of the outside world, as if they were the sole occupants of a distant and much over-heated star.

There are many people who have been endowed with one master-passion, that “like Aaron’s serpent swallows up the rest,” but Larry’s ingenuous breast harboured a nest of such serpents.  During his three years at Oxford, he had stormed from one enthusiasm to another; he had rowed, and boxed, and spouted politics, and, beginning with music, had stormed on through poetry and the drama, to painting.

Having taken a moderate degree, he had rushed in pursuit of this latest charmer to Paris, and the waters of the Quartier Latin then closed over him.  Occasionally a bubble would rise from those clouded deeps, and a letter to Aunt Freddy, or to Barty Mangan, would briefly announce his continued existence.  Sometimes he wrote to Christian, and would expand a little more to her; telling her of how one Professor had remarked of his work that it was now presque pas mal, and that this dizzying encomium had encouraged him to begin a Salon (its subject described at length, with elucidatory sketches); further, that he had taken a very jolly atelier, and “dear old Chose” was “on the Jury,” and would try and get him accepted, with much more to the same effect, music, politics, horses and hounds, forgotten as though they had never been.

Christian received these effusions with a characteristic mixture of respect for the artistic effort that they described, and of amused, almost pitying comprehension of the enthusiasm that they revealed.  It was three years since Larry had left Oxford and gone to France, and during those years Christian had learned more of life than Larry had acquired, or would ever acquire, in spite of the three years’ start of her with which he had begun the world.