the beauty of the Muir. She would understand, I knew. What I thought
she would feel, for our brains were cast in the same mould. The letter
finished, it was still too early to go to bed; so I picked up a
curious book called "Life's Shop Window" which I had been reading the
previous night, and read this passage which had struck me before, over
again:

"So, as we look into our future, we see ourselves beloved and wealthy;
victorious, famous, and free to wander through the sweetest paths of
the world, passing through a thousand scenes, sometimes loving,
sometimes warring, tasting and drinking of everything sweet and
stimulating, knowing all things, enjoying all in turn; but this is the
life of a God, not a man. And it is perhaps the God in us which so
savagely demands the life of a God."

"But it is not granted to us."

Yet this was the life I was trying to lead, and to some extent I
succeeded. Change, change, it is the life of life, perhaps especially
to the artist.

And I was an artist now, thanks to the decision of the Royal Academy
last year to accept the worst picture I had submitted to them for four
years. Ever since my fingers could clasp round anything at all they
had loved to hold a brush; for years in my teens I had studied
painting under the best teachers of technique in Italy. For two or
three years I had done really good work, with the divine afflatus
thrilling through every vein. And last year I had painted rather a
commonplace picture and it had been hung on the line in the Academy,
and so my friends all said I really was an artist now, and I modestly