hing or other, he didn't wait to see what, for, as far
as he got, it did not sound like him, did it? and we could honestly
agree that it did not.

[Illustration: Drawing by Himself
PHIL MAY IN CAP AND BELLS]

He could talk. I must not give the idea that he could not. I know some
of his friends who do not share or accept unqualified my memory of him
as a silent man. But he talked most and best when he had but a single
companion, and nothing could persuade me that he was not always
relieved, when the chance came, to let others do the talking for him.

I do not know what the attraction was that made everybody like him, not
merely the riffraff and the loafers who hung about his studio and
waylaid him in the street for what they could get out of him, but all
sorts of people who asked for nothing save his company--I could never
define the attraction to myself. It was not his looks. Even before his
last years, when he was the image of J.J. Shannon's portrait of him, his
appearance was not prepossessing. He dressed well according to his
ideals. Beardsley was not more of a dandy; but Beardsley was the dandy
of Piccadilly or the Boulevards, Phil May was the dandy of the
race-course. He brought with him that inevitable, indescribable look
that the companionship of horses gives and that in those days broke out
largely in short, wide-spreading covert coats and big pearl buttons. I
have always been grateful to the man who enlivens the monotony of dress
by a special fashion of his own, provided it belongs to him. The horsy
costume did belong to May, for he rode and hunted and was a good deal
with horses, but it was borrowed by some of his admirers until it
degenerated into almost as great an affectation as the artist's velvet
jacket and long hair, or the high stock and baggy corduroys of the Latin
Quarter imported into Chelsea. When the Beggarstaff Brothers, as Pryde
and Nicholson called themselves in those old days, would wander casually
into our rooms at the end of six or eight feet of poster that they had
brought to show J. and that needed a great deal of manipulation to bring
in at all, they looked as if the stable, not the studio, was their
workshop. And one young genius of an illustrator, who could not afford
to ride, and who I do not believe had ever been on a horse in his life,
could not mount the bus in his near suburb without putting on riding
breeches. But Phil May's dress was as essentially his as his silence.

Neither