The lady's mile

"HE IS BUT A LANDSCAPE-PAINTER."

It was high tide—spring tide, if you will—at half past-six o'clock on a warm June evening: not the commonplace ebb and flow of a vulgar river; but the mighty tide of fashion's wonderful sea, surging westward, under the dusty elms and lindens of the Lady's Mile. If you had driven round this very park between four and five on this very afternoon, you would have been gratified by the sight of some half-dozen nursemaids with their straggling charges, an occasional girl and perambulator, a picturesque life guardsman here and there, making a little spot of crimson amongst the wavering shadows of the trees, a few hulking idlers in corduroy and bluchers, and a tipsy female sleeping on the grass. Now the excited policemen have enough to do to keep the four ranks of carriages in line, and to rescue foot-passengers from the pawing hoofs of three-hundred-guinea steeds. The walk under the trees is as crowded as the enclosure at Ascot, and the iron chairs are as fully occupied as the seats in a fashionable chapel. The pouncing proprietor, with the leathern pouch at his side, has hard work to collect his rents, so rapidly do his customers come and go, and is distracted by vague fears of levanting tenants and bad debts. On all the length of the rails between Hyde-Park Corner and the Serpentine there is scarcely room for one lounger more, for the rule of fashion is so subtile a bondage, that it has compelled millions of people who never in all their lives have spoken to one another to wear the same order of garments, and talk the same slang, and ride in the same kind of carriages, and eat the same class of dinners, and congregate in the same places, at the same hour, year after year, and century after century, from the earliest dawn of civilisation until to-day.

The uninitiated lawyer's clerk from Holloway, lounging in the same attitude, and wearing the same pearl-grey gloves, and the same pattern of whisker as the initiated young patrician from the crack West-end clubs, may wonder whether the occupants of the splendid equipages rolling slowly by him are there by right divine of noble birth and lofty position, or by virtue of that golden 'open sesame,' that wonderful passe partout, which success bestows so often on the struggling plebeian. The Uninitiated from Holloway sees that there is not so much interchange of becks and nods, so friendly greetings, as might be expected if those elegant barouches and useful landaus, those dashing mail-phaetons and dainty little broughams, belonged only to the privileged classes whose highest privilege is the honour of being known to one another. Perceiving this, the Uninitiated perceives also, with astonished aspect, certain inhabitants of the Eastern Hemisphere, known to himself in their form of money-grub, but transformed here into butterflies of fashion, and driving mail-phaetons. Advertising agents, money-lending lawyers, professional betting-men, dashing brewers, popular distillers, pass before him side by side with dukes and duchesses, and only to be distinguished therefrom by an impalpable something which has no name. The Uninitiated, growing melancholy, begins to think that it is a hard thing not to have high-stepping horses and a mail-phaeton, and turns sadly from so much splendour to wend his way northwards, while high-born elbows close in upon the half-yard of railing which he leaves vacant. There are few places more calculated to inspire discontent that this Lady's Mile. Pale Envy stalks to and fro under the sheltering trees; Greed of Gain lurks invisible behind the iron chairs; Disappointed Ambition waits at the corner, ready to whisper in the poor man's ear, "Time was when you thought it such an easy thing to win a place amongst those favourites of fortune. Time was when you thought to see your wife sitting behind high-stepping horses, and your boy trotting his pony in the Row. Go home, poor drudge, with your blue-bag on your shoulder, and look at the slatternly drab leaning over the washtub, and the shabby whelp gambling for marbles in the gutter. Compare the picture of the present with the vision you once made for yourself of the future; and then be an agreeable husband and an indulgent father, and enjoy your domestic happiness and your penny newspaper, if you can."

We are a wealthy nation, the political economist tells the poor man, and our superfluous wealth must find employment somehow or other. Hench the crush of high-stepping horses, the crowd of three-hundred-guinea barouches; the flutter of costly garments rustling in the summer air, the glitter and splendour which pervades every object, until it seems almost as if the superfluous gold were melted into the atmosphere, and all the female population were so many Miss Kilmanseggs. The lounger on the rails may for the moment find it almost difficult to believe that hungry women and gaunt haggard-looking men can have any place in the world of which this dazzling region is a part: but he need only look backward, under the shadow of the trees, to see poverty and crime prowling side by side in their rags. Yet at the worst, the dazzle and the glitter are good for trade; and it is better that the tide of wealth should be rolling to and fro along the Lady's Mile than locked in a miser's coffers or given in alms to professional beggars at a church-door. Some part of the superfluous gold must pass through the horny hands of labour before it can be transmuted into C-springs or patent axles, Honiton lace or Spitalfields silk; and perhaps the safest of all philosophy is that which accepts the doctrine that "whatever is, is right."

But amongst the loungers on the rails this summer evening there was one person stationed with his companion some little distance from the rest of the idlers, who was very much inclined to quarrel with this easy-going axiom, or with any other sentiment that involved contentment. The eyes with which Philip Foley contemplated the world were young, and rather handsome eyes; but they saw every thing in a jaundiced light just now. He was a painter, self-contained and ambitious as a disciple of art should be. But he had not yet learnt the sublime patience of the faithful disciple; and he was angry with Fortune because she hid her face; forgetful that if she is a churlish mother, she can also be an over-indulgent one, and sometimes destroys her fairest favourites by smiling upon them too soon. Philip Foley was in love, and the girl he loved was the most capricious little enchantress who ever studied the prettiest method of breaking her adorers' hearts. The summer light which should have shone upon the back of his shabby painting-jacket, as he stood before his easel, dazzled his eyes as he looked along the Lady's Mile, seeking her carriage among the crowd.

"I say, Foley, old fellow, when are you coming out of this, eh?" demanded Sigismund Smythe, the novelist, who had abandoned the penny public to court the favour of circulating-library subscribers, and had sublimated the vulgar Smith into the aristocratic Smythe. Mr. Smythe the author and Mr. Foley the painter were sworn friends; and the placid Sigismund was recreating himself after a day's hard labour on the "Testimony" of his latest hero, "Written in the Hulks."

"Out of which?"

"The reflective line. You haven't spoke for the last quarter of an hour. That's a pretty girl with the strawberry-ice coloured parasol. I say, though, old fellow, you don't suppose I've written two dozen three volume, novels without knowing something of the human mind when contemplated in relation to the tender passion. I know all about it, you know; and it's not the least use your abandoning yourself to melancholy meditation on that subject. She's all your fancy painted her, &c. &c., I allow; but she's the coldest-hearted and most mercenary little scoundrel in creation, and she never can be yours. Put a clean sponge over the tablet of your brain, dear boy, and turn your attention to some body else."

"What new imbecility has afflicted your feeble intellect?" asked the painter indignantly. "I don't know what you're talking of."

"Oh yes, you do, dear boy, and it's the same thing that you are thinking of, and its name amongst the vulgar is Florence Crawford; but it is better known in polite society as 'Flo.'"

The young painter gave a sardonic laugh.

"I should be a fool to trouble my head about her," he said contemptuously.

"So you would be a fool, old fellow; and so you are a fool, for you do trouble yourself about her. You've been on the watch for her carriage for the last half-hour, and she has not gone by; for instead of tormenting creation at large by driving here, I dare say she is torturing mankind in particular by stopping at home. Don't be an idiot, Phil, but come to Greenwich and have some dinner."

"No," cried Philip, "I will stop here till she passes me by, with her insolent little affectation of not seeing me, and all the pretty tricks that constitute her fascination. You think me a fool, Sigismund; but you can never think so poorly of me as I think of myself when I find myself here day after day, while the very light I want is shining into my wretched painting room at Highbury. Do you remember what Catullus says?

Do you know that it is quite possible to love and hate the same person at the same moment? I love Florence Crawford because she is Florence Crawford. I hate her for the fatal bondage in which she holds me. I hate her for her evil influence upon my career. I hate her as the slave hates his master. Do other men suffer as I do, I wonder? or has feeling gone out of fashion, and am I behind the time? The most devoted lover nowadays only calls his betrothed a 'nice little party' and hopes the 'governor will do the right thing.' The men whom I meet take pains to advertise their contempt for any thing like real feeling; and girls of eighteen tell you with a smile that a love-match is the most preposterous thing in creation. The women of the present day are as heartless as they are beautiful; as artificial as they are charming,—the Dead-Sea fruit of civilisation, the——"

"The natural growth of the age of sixty-mile-an-hour locomotives," rejoined the placid Sigismund. "Do you forget that man is an imitative animal, and that the rate at which we travel has become the rate at which we live? Steam is the ruling principle of our age, and the pervading influence of our lives. Depend upon it, that ever since mankind began to exist, every succeeding age has lived faster than its predecessor. 'Time was that when the brains were out the man would die,' says Macbeth; 'but now,' &c. &c. He isn't a bit surprised at Banquo's appearance, you see. A ghost more or less is nothing extraordinary in a fast-going age. And we've been accelerating the pace ever since Macbeth's day. It used to take a man a week to go from London to Lyme Regis, and the best part of a lifetime to earn the few thousands which in his simple notions constituted a fortune. Nowadays a man goes from London to New York in less than a fortnight; and he expects to make his half-million or so while the purple bloom is on his locks, and the light of youth in his eyes. Steam is every where and in every thing. We educate our children by steam; and our men and women want to grow rich at the rate of sixty miles an hour. Every man has the same tastes, the same aspirations. There is no such person nowadays as the Sir Balaam who thought it a grand thing to have two puddings for his Sunday dinner. Sir Visto is not the exception, but the rule; and the poor man ruins himself by blindly following the rich. Sir Balaam has a man cook, and dines à la Russe. Sir Balaam's cashier has his dinners from the confectioner, and dines à la Russe too. Sir Visto, the Manchester cotton-spinner, is a patron of the arts, and buys largely at Christie's. His clerks follow in his wake, and cover the walls of their little suburban dining-rooms with impossible Cuyps and sham Backhuysens, bought in Wardour Street. Before we die we may see Sir Balaam and Sir Visto in the Gazette, with all their followers at their heels. Look at the dresses and carriages passing by us. I know most of the people, more or less; and I can see the wives and daughters of hard-working professional men vying with the peerage and the autocracy of the money market. Don't rail against the women, my dear Philip; the women are—what the men make them. You must have Lui before you can have Elle. Aspasia is impossible without Pericles. You could never have had a Cleopatra unless you had first your Cæsar; or your Marian de Lorme without Cinq Mars. The lives of the women of the present day are like this drive which they call the Lady's Mile. They go as far as they can, and then go back again. See how mechanically the horses wheel when they reach the prescribed turning-point. If they went any farther, I suppose they would be lost in some impenetrable forest depth in Kensington Gardens. In the drive the rule has no exception; because, you see, the barrier that divides the park from the gardens is a palpable iron railing, which the stoutest hunter might refuse. But on the highway of life the boundary line is not so clearly defined. There are women who lose themselves in some unknown region beyond the Lady's Mile, and whom we never hear of more. Ah, friend Philip, let us pity those benighted wanderers whose dismal stories are to be found amongst the chronicles of the Divorce Court, whose tarnished names are only whispered by scandal-loving dowagers between the acts of an opera, or in the pauses of a rubber. On this side, the barrier they pass seems so slight a one—a hedge of thorns that are half hidden by the gaudy tropical flowers that hang about them—a few scratches, and the boundary is passed; but when the desperate wanderer pauses for a moment on the other side to look backward, behold! the thorny hedgerow is transformed into a wall of brass that rises to the very skies, and shuts out earth and heaven."

It was not often that Mr. Smythe indulged in any such rhapsody as this in ordinary society; but Philip Foley and the novelist were sworn friends and brothers, united by that pleasant bondage of sympathy which is a better brotherhood than the commoner bond of kindred. Sigismund had brothers and sisters in Midlandshire, but there was not one of them who could be as much to him as Philip the painter.

It is doubtful whether Mr. Foley had heard much of his friend's oration. He had been leaning on the rails in a moody attitude, watching the carriages go by. And now, when he spoke, it seemed as if he were replying to some question that had been brooding in his own mind, rather than to the observations of his friend.

"Do you think I don't know Florence Crawford?" he said, "and know that she is no wife for me—if she would have me—and she would as soon think of marrying me as the carver and gilder who makes her father's frames. Indeed, I dare say she'd rather marry the frame-maker, for he earns more money than I do, and could give her finer dresses. She has told me a hundred times that she will marry for money; that when she leaves her father's house—a bride, with innocent bridal-flowers upon her brow—she will bid farewell to her home on the same principle as that on which her housemaid leaves her—to better herself. Think of her in my carpetless painting-room at Highbury, looking up from her work to watch me at my easel, and beguiling me with hopeful speeches when I am depressed. One reads of that sort of wife in a novel. But can you find me such a one nowadays, Sigismund? The women of the present day live only to look beautiful and to be admired. They are pitiless goddesses, at whose shrines men sacrifice the best gifts of their souls. When I look at the splendour of these carriages, the glory of the butterfly creatures who ride in them, I think how many plodding wretches are toiling in Temple-chambers, or lecturing in the theatres of hospitals, or pacing to and fro on the dusty floor of the Stock Exchange, racked by the thought of hazardous time-bargains, in order that these frivolous divinities may have gorgeous raiment and high-stepping horses, and plant the arrows of envious rage in one another's tender bosoms. I think they learn the love of splendour in their cradles. They are proud of their lace-frocks and gaudy sashes before they can speak: their dolls are duchesses; or, what is worse, as Hippolyte Rigault has said, 'poupées aux camélias.' And then they grow up, and some fine day a poor man falls in love with one of them, and finds that it would have been infinitely wiser to have dashed out his brains against a stone wall than to have been beguiled by the mad hope that a penniless lover's devotion could have any value in their sight."

"Wait till you have made a name, Phil, and can afford as grand a place as the Fountains, and then see if Miss Crawford won't be civil to you. Come, we may as well slope, old fellow; it's nearly seven o'clock. The enchantress will not appear to-night. Let us go some where and dine, and forget her."

"Dine by yourself, Sybarite," answered the painter. "A man whose most laborious picture sells for a ten-pound note has no right to whitebait and Moselle. I can buy half a pound of damp beef at the cook-shop as I go home. It will not be the first time that the silk-lining of my coat has been greased by a parcel from the cook-shop. I dare say I smell of beef sometimes when I call upon Florence Crawford."

"But, Phil, when you know I'm so glad to stand Sam—" remonstrated Mr. Smythe.

But he remonstrated in vain. Philip Foley rejoiced in his poverty and his deprivations as a gladiator might rejoice in the training that he knew must insure victory. (To suffer and be strong was the young painter's motto, and he took a boyish pride in his bare rooms and his scanty dinners, the feat of pedestrianism that saved him a half-crown in cab-hire, the heroism which enabled him to carry his head loftily under a hat whose bloom had vanished. He was very young. His faults were the faults of youth—his graces the graces that perish with youth. He had all the insolent confidence in his own judgment and the contempt for other people which seems the peculiar attribute of five-and-twenty. He would point you out the feeble drawing in a fresco by Michael Angelo, or the false lights in a Rembrandt, with an utter unconsciousness that he was making a fool of himself. Hot-headed, generous-hearted, impulsive, undisciplined, candid, and true, Philip Foley was the incarnation of ambitious youth before the fiery steel has been thrice refined in the furnace of disappointment. He had only just begun the great battle, and as yet he saw in failure the evidence of the popular error, and not of his own weakness. The vision of his own future shone before him—only a little distant, and with no hindering clouds between. He was ready to paraphrase Cæsar's despatch, and cry aloud to all the world, "I am coming—I shall see—I shall conquer!")

The painter did not turn his head to bid his friend Sigismund adieu; he was looking along the line of carriages for that one equipage, to behold which was so thrilling a pleasure that it was worth his while to waste half a day for the chance of obtaining it.

The fairy chariot came by at last, with the fairy in it, and all the mortal coaches melted into air. The fairy was a pretty, coquettish-looking girl, who seemed scarcely eighteen years of age, and whose dark-grey eyes and black eyelashes were rendered doubly enchanting by the piquancy of their contrast with her rippling golden hair. The fair one with the golden locks has become quite a common young person in these days of cunning hair-washes and Circassian waters; but Florence Crawford's waving tresses had been tinted only by the hand of Nature, and she was by no means proud of their sunny hue. She would have preferred to be a heavy-browed person of the masculine order, with blue-black hair and an aquiline nose, instead of that dear little insolent retroussé, which seemed perpetually asking questions of all humanity.

Yes; Miss Crawford's nose was decidedly retroussé; but it as little resembled the vulgar snub, or the lumpy pug, or the uncompromising turn-up, as a pearl resembles a lump of chalk.

It was the dearest and most delicate little nose that ever inhaled the odours of a costly bouquet in a box on the grand tier, or buried itself between the flossy ears of a Maltese terrier. It was an aristocratic nose, and could be as imperiously disdainful as the stateliest Roman; but whatever it was, its delicate outline was engraved on Philip Foley's heart too deeply for his worldly welfare or his bosom's peace. She was as far away from him as the young June moon that glimmered pale in the daylight above the Lady's Mile. And yet she was only a painter's daughter; but then there was all the distance that divides the topmost pinnacle of Fame's mighty mountain from the lowest depths of obscurity, between William Crawford, R.A., of the Fountains, Kensington, and Philip Foley, of Adelgisa Crescent, Highbury.

That he was clever, every body who knew any thing about the art he loved was ready to acknowledge; that he had something in him that was of a grander and sterner stuff than cleverness, Philip Foley himself knew very well. If he had been only clever, success would have been a much easier thing for him; and he knew this too.

Owen Meredith has very nobly said that "genius does what it must, and talent does what it can." And Philip Foley obeyed the ungovernable impulse within him, and flung gloom, and darkness, and meteoric skies, and raging seas, and all manner of Titanic grandeur upon his canvases, when he should have been painting inevitable rustic maidens in scarlet cloaks, trotting meekly across the wooden bridges that span placid mill-streams, or fishermen's white-sailed craft bobbing up and down upon bright blue-and-opal seas. If it had not been for the patronage of two or three north-country magnates, whose boyhood had been spent on the bleak shores of the German Ocean, and who bought Philip's rugged cliffs and darksome seas for love of their own vanished youth, the young painter would have found life's battle a sore and difficult fight; but with a little income of his own, the grace of these rich patrons, and the help of considerable employment from Mr. Crawford, for whom he sometimes painted backgrounds, Philip Foley was rich enough to have leisure to declaim about his poverty,—and your real poverty has no time for declamation. He was rich enough to live without care, to entertain his friends with unlimited bitter-beer from the nearest tavern, and to keep an unfailing supply of mild tobacco in the French china jar that adorned his mantelpiece. He could afford to dress like a gentleman, and to waste a good deal of his life in haunting the places where Florence Crawford was likely to be met; and, good year or bad year, he never failed to carry a rich silk dress, or a handsome shawl, or a wonderfully-inlaid casket, or workbox, or portfolio, or tea-caddy, to a maiden lady in a sleepy little village deep down in a pastoral valley some ten or twelve miles from Burkesfield, Bucks,—a valley that lay out of the track of coach-road or railway, and had made no more progress within the last forty years than if the inhabitants had been so many Rip Van Winkles.

The maiden lady was Philip Foley's aunt, and the only near relation he possessed. That she loved him to distraction was the most natural thing in the world, for she was a gentle and loving creature, and for the last five-and-twenty years of her life had concentrated her affection upon the orphan boy who had come from India a frail nursling to be committed to her charge by his sickly father, who went back to Bengal to die, within the year of his return, on a dismal march through a cholera-haunted district. Whence the child derived his love of art, no one knew. His father had been an ensign in the Company's service; his mother, a frivolous young person, with thirteen hundred pounds in Indian Stock, a tendency to consumption, and not two ideas of her own. But the divine afflatus that gives life to the nostrils of painters and poets is no hereditary possession to be handed from father to son, like so many acres of common earth, or so much money in Consols. From the hour in which Philip Foley's baby fingers first tightened round a pencil, he was an artist. He drew houses, and apple-trees, and straggling reptiles which he meant for horses, before he could speak; and then when he was old enough to buy his first colour-box, he went out into the woods and fields, like Constable; and alone, amongst the beautiful mysteries of nature, his soul and mind expanded, unfettered and untaught.

The time came, as it almost always does come, sooner or later, in the lives of gifted creatures, when the appreciative stranger came across the boy's pathway. An elderly gentleman came suddenly upon young Philip one day, as he sat on a fallen tree in a clearing, painting the glade that stretched before him, darkly mysterious in its sombre shadows. The elderly gentleman asked the boy more questions than he had ever been asked consecutively in his life before; and as it generally happens to a lad who is tolerably well connected, it happened in this case. The elderly gentleman had known a member of Philip's family, and was inclined to be interested in him on that account.

"But a great deal more so on account of those purple shadows," said the stranger pleasantly. "One may meet young sprigs of old families any day in the year; but a lad of fourteen who has such nice ideas about light and shade is by no means a common person. And your aunt is using all her interest to get you to Addiscombe, is she? so that you may follow in your father's footsteps, and die of cholera at sunrise, to be buried in the sands before sunset. Let your aunt use her interest to get you into Mr. O'Skuro's academy, and she'll be employing it for some purpose. Your mother had some money, hadn't she?"

"Fifty pounds a year," answered the boy blushing. He had all the grand notions which are common to extreme youth, and was almost ashamed to proclaim the pitiful amount.

"And very nice too," returned the stranger briskly; "I have known men whom fifty pounds a year—yes, or five-and-twenty—would have saved from ruin,—clever men who have starved for want of ten shillings a-week. A man with a pound a-week, secured to him for his lifetime, need never commit a dishonourable action, or accept an insult. Take me to see your aunt, Mr. Foley; and if I find her a sensible woman, we'll have you sitting behind your drawing-board at O'Skuro's Academy before the year is out."

The elderly gentleman was as good as his word. He turned out to be an amateur landscape-painter, who united untiring industry to the smallest amount of ability, and who, with a very limited income, had contrived to collect a wonderful little gallery of what he called "bits," broker's-shop and obscure sale-room acquisitions, which adorned the walls of a tiny cottage at Dulwich, and which he was wont to exhibit every Sunday to admiring friends or sceptical connoisseurs.

Before the year was out Miss Foley had consented to a bitter sacrifice, the sacrifice which she knew must come sooner or later, and had packed her boy's trunks, and stood on the platform at Burkesfield to watch the departure of the train that carried him away from her.

Mr. Theophilus Gee, the amateur and connoisseur, had talked her into the belief that her nephew was an embryo Turner; and she had bidden the boy go forth upon the first stage on the great highway that leads to glory, or to disappointment and death. He left the simple elegance of his aunt's cottage, and the tutorship of the Burkesfield curate, to plunge into the universal Bohemia of art; and for four years he worked conscientiously under the fostering care or Mr. O'Skuro. Then came foreign travel, and then pedestrian wanderings on the wildest shores of England and Wales, Highland rambles, excursions in Western Ireland, a long apprenticeship to that grand mistress, Nature, who is a better teacher than all the masters who ever created academicians. And at last the young painter established himself in a lodging at Highbury, and began to paint for his daily bread.

Then it was that his friend Mr. Gee introduced him to William Crawford, the great painter, who employed the embryo Turner to paint backgrounds for delicious little sketches that could have been covered half-a-dozen inches deep by the sovereigns that were given for them.

The young man accepted the employment, but disdained himself for accepting it, until there came an angel into the painting-room one day to take the painter's soul captive, and reconcile him to any lot that brought him near her. The angel was Florence, only child and spoiled darling of William Crawford, who came to ask her father for a check for her milliner. She was an angel with a tiny retroussé nose, and dark-grey eyes, that were generally mistaken for black; an impulsive angel with a temper that was more capricious than an April day.

For some time after that meeting in the painting-room, Philip believed that he admired Miss Crawford only as the most beautiful thing he had ever seen; but he woke one day to the knowledge that he loved her to distraction, and that the happiness of his life was as utterly at her mercy as the little golden toys hanging from her chatelaine, which she had so pretty a trick of trifling with when she talked to him.

Of all men upon earth, perhaps William Crawford was the least tainted by any odour of snobbishness. No intoxicating sense of triumph bewildered him on the giddy height to which he had risen. He stood serene upon the mountain top; for he looked upward to the starry Valhalla of dead painters—whose glory seemed as high above him as the stars in which he could fancy them dwelling—and not downward to the struggling wayfarers he had left behind him.

"If people knew as much about painting as I do, they wouldn't believe in my pictures," said Mr. Crawford.

He had rivals—rivals whom he envied and adored—against whose giant hands his own seemed to him so feeble and puny; but their names were Rembrandt and Velasquez, Rubens and Reynolds, Titian and Correggio, Guido and Vandyke. To him art seemed a grand republic, a brotherhood in which success had no power to divide a man from his brethren. He was rich, and he spent his money royally, for he was as fond of splendour as Rubens himself; and he had not Peter Paul's affection for gold. Perhaps no man who was equally successful ever had so few enemies as William Crawford. Young men adored him, struggling men came to him for advice, disappointed men poured their wrongs into his ears and took comfort from his sympathy. He was the ideal painter, and he ought to have sat in the pillared hall of some old Roman palace, with a band of faithful followers watching the free sweep of his inspired hand, and an emperor in attendance to pick up his maulstick. In this man's house Philip Foley came and went as freely as if he had been a kinsman of the host; and coming from church on a Sunday evening, the pious inhabitants of Adelgisa Crescent were apt to be startled by the apparition of the young painter dressed in evening costume, and bending his footsteps westward in the dusty summer twilight. Sunday evening at the "Fountains" was a grand institution. On that evening the painter was at home to his friends; and as the name of his friends was legion, very pleasant company was to be met at Kensington between nine and twelve on every Sabbath in the season. Rank and fashion, literature and art, war and physic, law and diplomacy, poverty and wealth, jostled one another in those bright, airy drawing-rooms. The painter's fame was cosmopolitan, and foreigners from every court and capital brought him their tribute of admiration; and amidst this elegant crowd Florence floated hither and thither, radiant in the most dazzling toilettes that Madame Descou could devise, and inflicting anguish upon the souls of her adorers by the capricious distribution of her smiles. And Philip, who could find no phrase too bitter for his denunciation of her follies, came every Sunday evening to tell her he hated and despised her, and would henceforth make it his business to forget her existence, remained to adore her, and went back to Highbury more utterly her slave than before.

She saw him as he lounged against the rails that bright June evening, and greeted him with a condescending little gesture of her head,—adorned with Madame Ode's last madness in the shape of a bonnet,—and then the barouche rolled by and she was gone. The carriages were growing thin. It was scarcely likely that she could return, for it was close upon her father's dinner-hour. Poor Philip wondered what party she was going to—with whom she would dance. He fancied her smiling destruction upon the gilded youth of Tyburnia and Belgravia. He thought of those charmed circles in which she was as remote from him as if she had gone to parties in the Pleiades; and then, as he crossed the park on his pilgrimage northwards, he set his strong white teeth together fiercely, and muttered:

"I will succeed!"

It was not to have his name inscribed upon the mighty roll where blaze the names of Raffaelle and Correggio that the young man aspired with such a passionate yearning, but to have an entrée in the West-end mansions where Florence Crawford was to be met.