conception of him is shattered. You may be gratified on general
grounds, but distinctly put out on personal ones, especially when
your conception pointed to his inevitable removal. That was the way
I felt.

The cheque stood for so much more than its money value. It stood
for a possible, nay, a probable capacity in Armour to take his place
in the stable body of society, to recognize and make demands, to
become a taxpayer, a churchgoer, a householder, a husband. As I
gazed, the signature changed from that of a gnome with luminous eyes
who inhabited an inaccessible crag among the rhododendrons to that
of a prosperous artist-bourgeois with a silk hat for Sundays. I
have in some small degree the psychological knack, I saw the
possibilities of the situation with immense clearness; and I cursed
the cheque.

Coincidence is odious, tells on the nerves. I never felt it more so
than a week later, when I read in the 'Pioneer' the announcement of
the death of my old friend Fry, Superintendent of the School of Art
in Calcutta. The paragraph in which the journal dismissed poor Fry
to his reward was not unkind, but it distinctly implied that the
removal of Fry should include the removal of his ideas and methods,
and the substitution of something rather more up to date. It
remarked that the Bengali student had been pinned down long enough
to drawing plaster casts, and declared that something should be done
to awake within him the creative idea. I remember the phrase, it
seemed so directly to suggest that the person to awake it should be
Ingersoll Armour.

I turned the matter over in my mind; indeed, for the best part of an