She passed by the table at which they were sitting, and he took her arm.

“Come and sit by my side, dear child, and let us play the divine comedy of love.”

“Fichez-moi la paix,” she said, and pushing him on one side continued her perambulation.

“Art,” he continued, with a wave of the hand, “is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.”

Cronshaw filled his glass again, and began to talk at length.  He spoke with rotund delivery.  He chose his words carefully.  He mingled wisdom and nonsense in the most astounding manner, gravely making fun of his hearers at one moment, and at the next playfully giving them sound advice.  He talked of art, and literature, and life.  He was by turns devout and obscene, merry and lachrymose.  He grew remarkably drunk, and then he began to recite poetry, his own and Milton’s, his own and Shelley’s, his own and Kit Marlowe’s.

At last Lawson, exhausted, got up to go home.

“I shall go too,” said Philip.

Clutton, the most silent of them all, remained behind listening, with a sardonic smile on his lips, to Cronshaw’s maunderings.  Lawson accompanied Philip to his hotel and then bade him good-night.  But when Philip got to bed he could not sleep.  All these new ideas that had been flung before him carelessly seethed in his brain.  He was tremendously excited.  He felt in himself great powers.  He had never before been so self-confident.

“I know I shall be a great artist,” he said to himself.  “I feel it in me.”

A thrill passed through him as another thought came, but even to himself he would not put it into words: 

“By George, I believe I’ve got genius.”

He was in fact very drunk, but as he had not taken more than one glass of beer, it could have been due only to a more dangerous intoxicant than alcohol.

XLIII

On Tuesdays and Fridays masters spent the morning at Amitrano’s, criticising the work done.  In France the painter earns little unless he paints portraits and is patronised by rich Americans; and men of reputation are glad to increase their incomes by spending two or three hours once a week at one of the numerous studios where art is taught.  Tuesday was the day upon which Michel Rollin came to Amitrano’s.  He was an elderly man, with a white beard and a florid complexion, who had painted a number of decorations for the State, but these were an object of derision to the students he instructed:  he was a disciple of Ingres, impervious to the progress of art and angrily impatient with that tas de farceurs whose names were Manet, Degas, Monet, and Sisley; but he was an excellent teacher, helpful, polite, and encouraging.  Foinet, on the other hand, who visited the studio on Fridays, was a difficult man to get on with.  He was a small, shrivelled person, with bad teeth and a bilious air, an untidy gray beard, and savage eyes; his voice was high and his tone sarcastic.  He had had pictures bought by the Luxembourg, and at twenty-five looked forward to a great career; but his talent was due to youth rather than to personality, and for twenty years he had done nothing but repeat the landscape which had brought him his early success.  When he was reproached with monotony, he answered: