ldom failed, and I do not
suppose a year passed that we did not chance upon one or more unexpected
friends in a gallery or a _cafe_ and add them to our party. Sometimes a
Publisher was with us, his affairs an excuse for a holiday, or sometimes
an Architect to show the poor foreigner how respectable British
respectability can be and, incidentally, to make his a guarantee of ours
that we could have dispensed with. Harland and Mrs. Harland were always
there, I do believe for sheer love of Paris in the May-time, and I
rather think theirs was the wisest reason of all.

During no week throughout my hard-working year did I have to work
harder than during that May week spent in Paris. I am inclined now, in
the more leisurely period of life at which I have arrived, to admire
myself when I recall how many articles I had to write, how many prints
and drawings, statues and pictures, I had to look at in order to write
them, and my success in never leaving my editors in the lurch. My
admiration is the greater because nobody could know as well as I how
slow I have always been with my work and also, to do myself justice, how
conscientious, as I do not mind saying, though to be called
conscientious by anybody else would seem to me only less offensive than
to be called good-natured or amiable. As a critic I never could get to
the point of writing round the pictures and saying nothing about them
like many I knew for whom five minutes in a gallery sufficed, nor, to be
frank, did I try to. Neither could I hang an article on one picture. I
might envy George Moore, for an interval the critic of the _Speaker_,
now the London _Nation_, because he could and did. I can remember him at
an Academy Press View making the interminable round with a business-like
briskness until, perhaps in the first hour and the last room, he would
come upon the painting that gave him the peg for his eloquence, make an
elaborate study of it, tell us his task was finished, and hurry off
exultant. But envy him as I might, I couldn't borrow his briskness. I
had to plod on all morning and again all afternoon until the Academy
closed, to look at every picture before I could be sure which was the
right peg or whether there might not be a dozen pegs and more. And I had
to collect elaborate notes, not daring to trust to my memory alone, and
after that to re-write pages that did not satisfy me. Just to see the
Academy meant an honest day's labour and in Paris there were two
_Sa