longing and ardour were meant for? Was experience to be muffled and
mutilated like an indecent picture? Was a man to sit and deliberately
condemn his future to be the blank memory of a regret rather than the
long possession of a treasure? Sacrifice? The word was a trap for minds
muddled by fear, an ignoble refuge of weakness. To insist now seemed not
to dare, but simply to BE, to live on possible terms.

His hostess came out to hang a moist cloth on the hedge, and, though her
guest was sitting quietly enough, she might have imagined in his kindled
eyes a flattering testimony to the quality of her wine. As she turned
back into the house she was met by a young man of whom Longmore took
note in spite of his high distraction. He was evidently a member of that
jovial fraternity of artists whose very shabbiness has an affinity with
the unestablished and unexpected in life--the element often gazed at
with a certain wistfulness out of the curtained windows even of the
highest respectability. Longmore was struck first with his looking like
a very clever man and then with his looking like a contented one. The
combination, as it was expressed in his face, might have arrested the
attention of a less exasperated reasoner. He had a slouched hat and a
yellow beard, a light easel under one arm, and an unfinished sketch in
oils under the other. He stopped and stood talking for some moments to
the landlady, while something pleasant played in his face. They were
discussing the possibilities of dinner; the hostess enumerated some very
savoury ones, and he nodded briskly, assenting to everything. It
couldn't be, Longmore thought, that he found such ideal ease in the
prospect of lamb-chops and spinach and a croute aux fruits. When the
dinner had been ordered he turned up his sketch, and the good woman fell
to admiring and comparing, to picking up, off by the stream-side, the
objects represented.