I've led the life of the world, with my wife and my progeny; the clumsy
conventional expensive materialised vulgarised brutalised life of London.
We've got everything handsome, even a carriage--we're perfect Philistines
and prosperous hospitable eminent people. But, my dear fellow, don't try
to stultify yourself and pretend you don't know what we _haven't_ got.
It's bigger than all the rest. Between artists--come!" the Master wound
up. "You know as well as you sit there that you'd put a pistol-ball into
your brain if you had written my books!"

It struck his listener that the tremendous talk promised by him at
Summersoft had indeed come off, and with a promptitude, a fulness, with
which the latter's young imagination had scarcely reckoned. His
impression fairly shook him and he throbbed with the excitement of such
deep soundings and such strange confidences. He throbbed indeed with the
conflict of his feelings--bewilderment and recognition and alarm,
enjoyment and protest and assent, all commingled with tenderness (and a
kind of shame in the participation) for the sores and bruises exhibited
by so fine a creature, and with a sense of the tragic secret nursed under
his trappings. The idea of _his_, Paul Overt's, becoming the occasion of
such an act of humility made him flush and pant, at the same time that
his consciousness was in certain directions too much alive not to
swallow--and not intensely to taste--every offered spoonful of the
revelation. It had been his odd fortune to blow upon the deep waters, to
make them surge and break in waves of strange eloquence. But how
couldn't he give out a passionate contradiction of his host's last
extravagance, how couldn't he enumerate to him the parts of his work he
loved, the splendid things he had found in it, beyond the compass of any
other writer of the day? St. George listened a while, courteously; then
he said, laying his hand on his visitor's: "That's all very well; and if
your idea's to do nothing better there's no reason you shouldn't have as