under-current of
understanding between the two painters which was the reverse of
sympathetic, and made conversation difficult and volcanic. It caused
him to remind himself, a trifle sadly, how little, after all, one
knew of even one's nearest friend--and Lightmark, perhaps, occupied
to him that relation--how much of the country of his mind remains
perpetually undiscovered; and it made him wonder, as he had
sometimes wondered before, whether the very open and sunny nature of
the young painter, which was so large a part of his charm, had not
its concealed shadows--how far, briefly, Lightmark's very frankness
might not be a refinement of secretiveness?

If, however, a word here and there, a trait surprised, indefinable,
led him on occasion to doubt of his dominant impression of
Lightmark's character, these doubts were never of long duration; and
he would dismiss them, barely entertained, even as a sort of
disloyalty, to the limbo of stillborn fancies. And so now, with his
accustomed generosity, he speedily flung himself into the breach,
and did his best to drive the conversation into impersonal and
presumably safer channels. He touched on the prospects of the
Academy, of academic art, and art in general, and by-and-by, as
Oswyn rose to the discussion, he became himself interested, and was
actuated less by a wish to make conversation than to draw his new
friend out. And as the artist leant forward, grew excited, with his
white, lean face working into strange contortions--as he shot out
his savage paradoxes, expounding the gospel of the new art a trifle
thickly now, and rolling and as rapidly smoking perpetual
cigarettes, he found him again strangely attractive.

He had flashes of insight, it seemed to Rainham; there was something
in his caustic criticism which led him to believe that he could at
another time have justified himself, defended reasonably and sanely
a position that was at least tenable.

But the tide of his spleen invariably overtook him, and he abandoned
exegesis for tirade. The _bourgeois_, limited scope of the art in
vogue--this was the burden of his reiterated rabid attacks; art
watered down to suit the public's insipid palate, and he quoted
Chamfort furiously: "Combien de sots faut-il pour faire un
public?"--the art of simpering prettiness, without root or fruit in
life, the art of absolute convention. He ran over a list of
successful names with an ever-growing rancour--artistic hacks, the
crew of th