But this evening Philip, undecided, wanted to talk about himself.  Fortunately it was late already and Cronshaw’s pile of saucers on the table, each indicating a drink, suggested that he was prepared to take an independent view of things in general.

“I wonder if you’d give me some advice,” said Philip suddenly.

“You won’t take it, will you?”

Philip shrugged his shoulders impatiently.

“I don’t believe I shall ever do much good as a painter.  I don’t see any use in being second-rate.  I’m thinking of chucking it.”

“Why shouldn’t you?”

Philip hesitated for an instant.

“I suppose I like the life.”

A change came over Cronshaw’s placid, round face.  The corners of the mouth were suddenly depressed, the eyes sunk dully in their orbits; he seemed to become strangely bowed and old.

“This?” he cried, looking round the cafe in which they sat.  His voice really trembled a little.

“If you can get out of it, do while there’s time.”

Philip stared at him with astonishment, but the sight of emotion always made him feel shy, and he dropped his eyes.  He knew that he was looking upon the tragedy of failure.  There was silence.  Philip thought that Cronshaw was looking upon his own life; and perhaps he considered his youth with its bright hopes and the disappointments which wore out the radiancy; the wretched monotony of pleasure, and the black future.  Philip’s eyes rested on the little pile of saucers, and he knew that Cronshaw’s were on them too.

LI

Two months passed.

It seemed to Philip, brooding over these matters, that in the true painters, writers, musicians, there was a power which drove them to such complete absorption in their work as to make it inevitable for them to subordinate life to art.  Succumbing to an influence they never realised, they were merely dupes of the instinct that possessed them, and life slipped through their fingers unlived.  But he had a feeling that life was to be lived rather than portrayed, and he wanted to search out the various experiences of it and wring from each moment all the emotion that it offered.  He made up his mind at length to take a certain step and abide by the result, and, having made up his mind, he determined to take the step at once.  Luckily enough the next morning was one of Foinet’s days, and he resolved to ask him point-blank whether it was worth his while to go on with the study of art.  He had never forgotten the master’s brutal advice to Fanny Price.  It had been sound.  Philip could never get Fanny entirely out of his head.  The studio seemed strange without her, and now and then the gesture of one of the women working there or the tone of a voice would give him a sudden start, reminding him of her:  her presence was more noticuble?? now she was dead than it had ever been during her life; and he often dreamed of her at night, waking with a cry of terror.  It was horrible to think of all the suffering she must have endured.