In his eighteenth year he gradually awoke to consciousness of change.  One of his classmates at the Polytechnic institute, with whom be had picked a slight acquaintance, said one evening as they were walking homeward together:  “I shan’t be coming here after next week.  I’ve got a good clerkship in the city.  What are you doing?”

“I’m an artist’s model,” said Paul.

The other, a pale and perky youth, sniffed.  His name was Higgins.  “Good Lord!  What do you mean?”

“I’m a model in the life class of the Royal Academy School,” said Paul, proudly.

“You stand up naked in front of all kinds of people for them to paint you?”

“Of course,” said Paul.

“How beastly!” said Higgins.

“What do you mean?”

“Just that,” said Higgins.  “It’s beastly!”

A minute or two afterward he jumped on a passing the omnibus, and thenceforward avoided Paul at the Polytechnic Institute.

This uncompromising pronouncement on the part of Higgins was a shock; but together with other incidents, chiefly psychological, vague, intangible phenomena of his spiritual development, it showed Paul the possibility of another point of view.  He took stock of himself.  From the picturesque boy he had grown into the physically perfect man.  As a model he was no longer sought after for subject pieces.  He was in clamorous demand at Life Schools, where he drew a higher rate of pay, but where he was as impersonal to the intently working students as the cast of the Greek torso which other students were copying in the next room.  The intimacy of the studio, the warmth and the colour and the meretricious luxury were gone from his life.  On the other hand he was making money.  He had fifty pounds in the Savings Bank, the maximum of petty thrift which an incomprehensive British Government encourages, and a fair, though unknown, sum in an iron money-box hidden behind his washstand.  Up to now he had had no time to learn how to spend money.  When he took to smoking cigarettes, which he had done quite recently, he regarded himself as a man.

Higgins’s “How beastly!” rang in his head.  Although he could not quite understand the full meaning of the brutal judgment, it brought him disquiet and discontent.  For one thing, like the high-road, his profession led nowhither.  The thrill of adventure had gone from it.  It was static, and Paul’s temperament was dynamic.  He had also lost his boyish sense of importance, of being the central figure in the little stage.  Disillusion began to creep over him.  Would he do nothing else but this all his life?  Old Erricone, the patriarchal, white-bearded Italian, the doyen of the models of London, came before his mind, a senile posturer, mumbling dreary tales of his inglorious achievements:  how he was the Roman Emperor in this picture and Father Abraham in the other; how painters could not get on without him; how once he had been summoned from Rome to London; how Rossetti had shaken hands with him.  Paul shivered at the thought of himself as the Erricone of a future generation.