season of all the English year, whatever cynics may say about it!"
"As champagne is the finest of all wines," said Dick, "and this is more than superb; Philip Forsyth, I repeat you are an extravagant dog!"
"And I reply I am none, as the prisoner said to Dogberry. But if I were, I am spending my own money, and I have no false pride. I make it a rule never to let a week pass without its pot-boiler."
This was quite true, and it was another contradiction of the ordinary interpretation of genius, if Philip really was a genius. The young fellow did not believe in drawing all his supplies from his mother; if he dreamed he worked. There was none of the careless, indifferent impecuniosity that people associate with genius in this young artist's disposition. He not only made a sufficient income to supply his modest or luxurious desires, but also to enable him to contribute occasionally an article of vertu to his mother's rooms in Adelphi Terrace, the most picturesque and inspiriting situation, he contended, in all London. But his pot-boilers were not mere conventionalities. They were bits of color, impressions, fancies, replicas of studies, musings in tone, and trifles of various—kinds which cost him neither trouble nor labor, and of which he thought nothing—for his ambition, if he had an ambition, was heroic—it soared, but it was emotional, and required an object.
"About that woman: last week at the opera I saw a face that I shall never forget. It was partially hidden by the box curtains which draped it, the neck being in shadow, the remainder of the figure hidden. It was a woman of thirty, I should say, with the suffering of a century in her eyes; suffering and a consuming passion; the pallid face one sees in prisoners who have been long in confinement, but without the sad resignation that mostly accompanies it.
