the conversation into impersonal and presumably safer channels.  He touched on the prospects of the Academy, of academic art, and art in general, and by-and-by, as Oswyn rose to the discussion, he became himself interested, and was actuated less by a wish to make conversation than to draw his new friend out.  And as the artist leant forward, grew excited, with his white, lean face working into strange contortions—­as he shot out his savage paradoxes, expounding the gospel of the new art a trifle thickly now, and rolling and as rapidly smoking perpetual cigarettes, he found him again strangely attractive.

He had flashes of insight, it seemed to Rainham; there was something in his caustic criticism which led him to believe that he could at another time have justified himself, defended reasonably and sanely a position that was at least tenable.

But the tide of his spleen invariably overtook him, and he abandoned exegesis for tirade.  The bourgeois, limited scope of the art in vogue—­this was the burden of his reiterated rabid attacks; art watered down to suit the public’s insipid palate, and he quoted Chamfort furiously:  “Combien de sots faut-il pour faire un public?”—­the art of simpering prettiness, without root or fruit in life, the art of absolute convention.  He ran over a list of successful names with an ever-growing rancour—­artistic hacks, the crew of them, the journalists of painting—­with a side glance at Lightmark, who sat pulling his flaxen moustache, looking stiff and nervous—­he would hang the lot of them to-morrow if he had his way, for corrupters of taste, or, better still, condemn them to perpetual incarceration in the company of their own daubs.  These people, in fine, the mutual admiration society of incompetents—­where was their justification, where would they be in a decade or so?  The hangers-on of the fashionable world, caring for their art as a means of success, of acquiring guineas or a baronetcy or a couple of initials, who dropped the little technique they possessed as soon as they had a competency, and foisted their pictures most on people when they had forgotten how to paint. Pompiers, fumistes, makers of respectable pommade—­as the painter’s potations increased, his English became less fluent, and he was driven back constantly to the dialect of the Paris ateliers, which was more familiar to him than his mother tongue.  Ah! how he hated these people and their thread-paper morality, and their sordid conception of art—­a prettiness that would sell!

Rainham had heard it all before; it was full of spleen and rancour, unnecessarily violent, and, conceivably, unjust.  But what he could not help recognising, in spite of his repulsion, was a certain nobility and singleness in the man, ruin as he was.  Virtue came out of him; he had the saving quality of genius, and it was a veritable burning passion of perfection, which masqueraded in his spleen.  His conception