go to my work at the British
Museum I see the faces of the people become daily more corrupt." I
convinced myself for a time, that on the same journey I saw but what he
saw. Certain old women's faces filled me with horror, faces that are no
longer there, or if they are pass before me unnoticed: the fat blotched
faces, rising above double chins, of women who have drunk too much beer
and eaten much meat. In Dublin I had often seen old women walking with
erect heads and gaunt bodies, talking to themselves with loud voices, mad
with drink and poverty, but they were different, they belonged to romance.
Da Vinci had drawn women who looked so and so carried their bodies.

XVI

I attempted to restore one old friend of my father's to the practice of
his youth, but failed, though he, unlike my father, had not changed his
belief. My father brought me to dine with Jack Nettleship at Wigmore
Street, once inventor of imaginative designs and now a painter of
melodramatic lions. At dinner I had talked a great deal--too much, I
imagine, for so young a man, or maybe for any man--and on the way home my
father, who had been plainly anxious that I should make a good impression,
was very angry. He said I had talked for effect and that talking for
effect was precisely what one must never do; he had always hated rhetoric
and emphasis and had made me hate it; and his anger plunged me into great
dejection. I called at Nettleship's studio the next day to apologise, and
Nettleship opened the door himself and received me with enthusiasm. He had
explained to some woman guest that I would probably talk well, being an
Irishman, but the reality had surpassed, etc., etc. I was not flattered,
though relieved at not having to apologise, for I soon discovered that
what he really admired was my volubility, for he himself was very silent.
He seemed about sixty, had a bald head, a grey beard, and a nose, as one
of my father's friends used to say, like an opera-glass, and sipped cocoa
all the afternoon and evening from an enormous tea-cup that must have been
designed for him alone, not caring how cold the cocoa grew. Years before
he had been thrown from his horse, while hunting, and broke his arm, and
because it had been badly set suffered great pain for a long time. A
little whisky would always stop the pain, and soon a little became a great
deal and he found himself a drunkard, but having signed his liberty away
for certain months he was completely cured. H