people whose portraits he had painted, and whose impertinences he had
patiently submitted to; the mean bargainers who had treated him like a
tradesman; the dastardly men of business who had disgraced their order
by taking advantage of his simplicity--how hardly and cruelly such
insect natures of this world had often dealt with that noble heart! how
despicably they had planted their small gad-fly stings in the high soul
which it was never permitted to them to subdue!

No! not once to subdue, not once to tarnish! All petty humiliations
were forgotten in one look at "Lavvie's Drawing-Room;" all stain of
insolent words vanished from Valentine's memory in the atmosphere of
the Studio. Never was a more superficial judgment pronounced than when
his friends said that he had thrown away his whole life, because he had
chosen a vocation in which he could win no public success. The lad's
earliest instincts had indeed led him truly, after all. The art to
which he had devoted himself was the only earthly pursuit that could
harmonize as perfectly with all the eccentricities as with all the
graces of his character, that could mingle happily with every joy,
tenderly with every grief; belonging to the quiet, simple, and innocent
life, which, employ him anyhow, it was in his original nature to lead.
But for this protecting art, under what prim disguises, amid what foggy
social climates of class conventionality, would the worlds clerical,
legal, mercantile, military, naval, or dandy, have extinguished this
man, if any one of them had caught him in its snares! Where would then
have been his frolicsome enthusiasm that nothing could dispirit; his
inveterate oddities of thought, speech, and action, which made all his
friends laugh at him and bless him in the same breath; his affections,
so manly in their firmness, so womanly in their tenderness, so
childlike in their frank, fearless confidence that dreaded neither
ridicule on the one side, nor deception on the other? Where, and how,