ted a good post as teacher
somewhere in India. But he lived a short time to enjoy it and I am sure
he was homesick for Venice, and the search after the impossible, and the
old days when he was so abominably hard up that even J. and I were
richer. Of the complete crash by which we all gained--including the man
who got the Whistler painted on the back of a Jobbins panel--I still
have reminders in a brass plaque and bits of embroideries hung up on our
walls and brocades made into screens, which J. bought from him to save
the situation, at the risk of creating a new one from which somebody
would have to save us.

For all his weariness, Jobbins looked ridiculously young. He insisted
that this was what lost him his one chance of selling a picture. He was
painting in the Frari a subject which he vainly hoped was his own, when
an American family of three came and stared over his shoulder.

"Why, it's going to be a picture!" the small child discovered.

"And he such a boy too!" the mother marvelled.

"Then it can't be of any value," the father said in the loud cheerful
voice in which American and English tourists in Venice make their most
personal comments, convinced that nobody can understand, though every
other person they meet is a fellow countryman. A story used to be told
of Bunney at work in the _Piazza_, on his endless study of St. Mark's
for Ruskin, one bitter winter morning, when three English girls, wrapped
in furs, passed. One stopped behind him:

"Oh Maud! Ethel!" she called, "do come back and see what this poor
shivering old wretch is doing."

The talk in our corner of the _Orientale_ kept us in the past until I
began to fear that, just as some people grow prematurely grey, so J. and
I, not a year married, had prematurely reached the time for creeping in
close about the fire--or a _cafe_ table--and telling grey tales of what
we had been. It was a very different past from that which tourists were
then bullied by Ruskin into believing should alone concern them in
Venice--indeed, my greatest astonishment in this astonishing year was
that, while the people who were not artists but posed as knowing all
about art did nothing but quote Ruskin, artists never quoted him, and
never mentioned him except to show how little use they had for him. But
then, as I was beginning to find out, it is the privilege of the artist
to think what he knows and to say what he thinks. We were none of us
tourists at our little table, we we