f his family broke into his studio during
working hours. His work both as draughtsman and writer was always
produced without any of that pathetic travail which for many artists and
writers lies between conception and expression. He did not exhibit the
most unpleasant of the traits of a talented person--the overstrung
condition of nerves which makes a man unpleasant to a household; he
preserved the serenity that pertains to greater genius still. His house
was always an open one, and the life in it must have been highly
typical of that English family life of which he was the pre-eminent poet
in his drawings.

Du Maurier was elected a member of the Athenaeum Club under Rule 2. He
showed his appreciation of this Club by not making use of any other,
though he was such a highly sociable man. He was early a member of the
Arts Club, though using it less frequently after its removal to the
Dover Street house, of old-world distinction. At the Athenaeum he
frequented the billiard-room as a sociable place, though he was not very
fond of billiards or card games. He could get on quite well in life upon
"conversation" as a recreation, interspersed with music.

After the great _Trilby_ boom, and when he was writing _The Martian_--in
fact, only a year before his death, the artist moved into town to live
in Oxford Square. He was partly influenced in this by the expiration of
the twenty-one years' lease upon which he held the Hampstead property.

In a paper contributed to the _Hampstead Annual_ for 1897, the issue
following the artist's death, Canon Ainger traced various Hampstead
spots to be identified as the backgrounds of du Maurier's subjects, and
recalls how on Hampstead Heath many subjects for _Punch_ came to be
discussed between them in the course of conversation. He describes the
way that one of the artist's most famous jests, in the days of Maudle
and Postlethwaite, took its final shape one day in Hampstead, and by a
singular chance arose out of a University sermon at Cambridge.

A certain well-known humorist of the time had remarked that the
objection to Blue China (it was the special craze at the moment) was
that it was so difficult to "live up to it." This utterance had been
lately taken somewhat over-seriously by a special preacher before the
University who, discoursing on the growing extravagances and frivolities
of the age, wound up an indignant tirade by an eloquent peroration to
the effect that things had come to a sad