preferences or prejudices, nor was he in any sense a brilliant or
suggestive writer, I think he had merged himself very much in the life of
our little society, and kept things together more than I was at first
aware.

Then came Kaye, one of the least conspicuous of the whole group, though he
has since become perhaps the best known, by his poems and his beautiful
critical studies in both art and literature. Kaye is known as one of those
rare figures in literature, a creative critic. His rich and elaborate
style, his exquisite sidelights, his poetical faculty of interpretation,
make his work famous, though hardly popular. But I found that he worked
very slowly and even painfully, deliberately secreting his honey, and
depositing it cell by cell. He had a peculiar intimacy with Father Payne,
who treated him with a marked respect. Kaye was by far the most absorbed of
the party, went and came like a great moth, was the first to disappear, and
generally the last to arrive. Neither did he make any attempt at
friendship. He was a handsome and graceful fellow, now about thirty, with a
worn sort of beauty in his striking features, curling hair, long languid
frame, and fine hands. His hands, I used to think, were the most eloquent
things about him, and he was ever making silent little gestures with them,
as though they were accompanying unuttered trains of thought; but he had,
too, a strained and impatient air, as if he found the pursuit of phrases a
wearing and hazardous occupation. I used to feel Kaye the most attractive
and impressive of our society; but he neither made nor noticed any signals
of goodwill, though always courteous and kindly.

Pollard was a totally different man: he was about twenty-eight, and he was
writing some work of fiction. He was a small, sturdy, rubicund creature,
with beady eyes and pink cheeks, cherubic in aspect, entirely good-natured
and lively, full of not very exalted humour, and with a tendency to wild