“Never, never, never.”

Moret was in those days an old-fashioned town of one street at the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, and the Ecu d’Or was a hotel which still had about it the decrepit air of the Ancien Regime.  It faced the winding river, the Loing; and Miss Chalice had a room with a little terrace overlooking it, with a charming view of the old bridge and its fortified gateway.  They sat here in the evenings after dinner, drinking coffee, smoking, and discussing art.  There ran into the river, a little way off, a narrow canal bordered by poplars, and along the banks of this after their day’s work they often wandered.  They spent all day painting.  Like most of their generation they were obsessed by the fear of the picturesque, and they turned their backs on the obvious beauty of the town to seek subjects which were devoid of a prettiness they despised.  Sisley and Monet had painted the canal with its poplars, and they felt a desire to try their hands at what was so typical of France; but they were frightened of its formal beauty, and set themselves deliberately to avoid it.  Miss Chalice, who had a clever dexterity which impressed Lawson notwithstanding his contempt for feminine art, started a picture in which she tried to circumvent the commonplace by leaving out the tops of the trees; and Lawson had the brilliant idea of putting in his foreground a large blue advertisement of chocolat Menier in order to emphasise his abhorrence of the chocolate box.

Philip began now to paint in oils.  He experienced a thrill of delight when first he used that grateful medium.  He went out with Lawson in the morning with his little box and sat by him painting a panel; it gave him so much satisfaction that he did not realise he was doing no more than copy; he was so much under his friend’s influence that he saw only with his eyes.  Lawson painted very low in tone, and they both saw the emerald of the grass like dark velvet, while the brilliance of the sky turned in their hands to a brooding ultramarine.  Through July they had one fine day after another; it was very hot; and the heat, searing Philip’s heart, filled him with languor; he could not work; his mind was eager with a thousand thoughts.  Often he spent the mornings by the side of the canal in the shade of the poplars, reading a few lines and then dreaming for half an hour.  Sometimes he hired a rickety bicycle and rode along the dusty road that led to the forest, and then lay down in a clearing.  His head was full of romantic fancies.  The ladies of Watteau, gay and insouciant, seemed to wander with their cavaliers among the great trees, whispering to one another careless, charming things, and yet somehow oppressed by a nameless fear.

They were alone in the hotel but for a fat Frenchwoman of middle age, a Rabelaisian figure with a broad, obscene laugh.  She spent the day by the river patiently fishing for fish she never caught, and Philip sometimes went down and talked to her.  He found out that she had belonged to a profession whose most notorious member for our generation was Mrs. Warren, and having made a competence she now lived the quiet life of the bourgeoise.  She told Philip lewd stories.