or in the Chantrey collection.  The writer also inquired, with equal blandness, why a painter who had been on the hanging committee of the Societe Nationale des Beaux Arts at Paris should not have been found worthy to be even an A.R.A. in London.  In brief, old England ‘caught it’, as occurred somewhere or other most nights in the columns of the Gazette.  Fuge also received his deserts as a man.  And the Gazette did not conceal that he had not been a man after the heart of the British public.  He had been too romantically and intensely alive for that.  The writer gave a little penportrait of him.  It was very good, recalling his tricks of manner, his unforgettable eyes, and his amazing skill in talking about himself and really interesting everybody in himself.  There was a special reference to one of Fuge’s most dramatic recitals—­a narration of a night spent in a boat on Ham Lake with two beautiful girls, sisters, natives of the Five Towns, where Fuge was born.  Said the obituarist:  ’Those two wonderful creatures who played so large a part in Simon Fuge’s life.’

This death was a shock to me.  It took away my ennui for the rest of the journey.  I too had known Simon Fuge.  That is to say, I had met him once, at a soiree, and on that single occasion, as luck had it, he had favoured the company with the very narration to which the Gazette contributor referred.  I remembered well the burning brilliance of his blue-black eyes, his touching assurance that all of us were necessarily interested in his adventures, and the extremely graphic and convincing way in which he reconstituted for us the nocturnal scene on Ham Lake—­the two sisters, the boat, the rustle of trees, the lights on shore, and his own difficulty in managing the oars, one of which he lost for half-an-hour and found again.  It was by such details as that about the oar that, with a tint of humour, he added realism to the romantic quality of his tales.  He seemed to have no reticences concerning himself.  Decidedly he allowed things to be understood...!  Yes, his was a romantic figure, the figure of one to whom every day, and every hour of the day, was coloured by the violence of his passion for existence.  His pictures had often an unearthly beauty, but for him they were nothing but faithful renderings of what he saw.

My mind dwelt on those two beautiful sisters.  Those two beautiful sisters appealed to me more than anything else in the Gazette’s obituary.  Surely—­Simon Fuge had obviously been a man whose emotional susceptibility and virile impulsiveness must have opened the door for him to multifarious amours—­but surely he had not made himself indispensable to both sisters simultaneously.  Surely even he had not so far forgotten that Ham Lake was in the middle of a country called England, and not the ornamental water in the Bois de Boulogne!  And yet....  The delicious possibility of ineffable indiscretions on the part of Simon Fuge monopolized my mind till the train stopped at Knype, and I descended.  Nevertheless, I think I am a serious and fairly insular Englishman.  It is truly astonishing how a serious person can be obsessed by trifles that, to speak mildly, do not merit sustained attention.