em, the journalists of painting--with a side glance at
Lightmark, who sat pulling his flaxen moustache, looking stiff and
nervous--he would hang the lot of them to-morrow if he had his way,
for corrupters of taste, or, better still, condemn them to perpetual
incarceration in the company of their own daubs. These people, in
fine, the mutual admiration society of incompetents--where was their
justification, where would they be in a decade or so? The hangers-on
of the fashionable world, caring for their art as a means of
success, of acquiring guineas or a baronetcy or a couple of
initials, who dropped the little technique they possessed as soon as
they had a competency, and foisted their pictures most on people
when they had forgotten how to paint. _Pompiers_, _fumistes_, makers of
respectable _pommade_--as the painter's potations increased, his
English became less fluent, and he was driven back constantly to the
dialect of the Paris _ateliers_, which was more familiar to him than
his mother tongue. Ah! how he hated these people and their
thread-paper morality, and their sordid conception of art--a
prettiness that would sell!

Rainham had heard it all before; it was full of spleen and rancour,
unnecessarily violent, and, conceivably, unjust. But what he could
not help recognising, in spite of his repulsion, was a certain
nobility and singleness in the man, ruin as he was. Virtue came out
of him; he had the saving quality of genius, and it was a veritable
burning passion of perfection, which masqueraded in his spleen. His
conception of art for the sake of art only might be erroneous, but
it was at least exalted; and the instinct which drove him always for
his material directly to life, rejecting nothing as common or
unclean--in the violence of his revolt, perhaps dwelling too
uniformly on what was fundamentally ugly--might be disputable, but
was obviously sincere. The last notion which Rainham took away with
him, when they parted late in the evening (Oswyn having suddenly
lapsed from the eloquence to the incoherency of drunkenness), was a
wish to see more of him. He had given him his card, and he waited
until he had seen him place it--after observing it for some moments
attentively with lack-lustre eyes--in the security of his waistcoat.
And as the two friends walked towards Charing Cross, Rainham
observed that he hoped he would call.

"He is a disreputable fellow," said Lightmark a little sullenly,
"and an unprofitable