their paradise with envy; that I would live the same life if I had the means.  I fully admit that I am not nearly so perfectly equipped with culture as my friends.  I have not got a quarter of their stock or of their experience; but yet I am as absolutely sure that I, with all my deficiencies and ignorances, negligences, incompletenesses, am inside the sacred circle of art, as I am certain that they are without it.  To me beauty is a holy and bewildering passion; a divine spirit, that sometimes heaps treasures upon me with both hands, and sometimes denies the least hint of her influence.  But they, I feel, mistake craftsmanship and accomplishment and technique for the inner spirit of art; they have never felt the awful rapture, the overwhelming impulse.  And thus, as I say, I return with a sense of weary gratitude to my lonely house with its austere rooms; to my old piano, my old books; to my wide fields and leafless trees, as of one returning home to worship at a quiet shrine, after being compelled to play a part in a pageant which is not concerned with the things of the soul.

XLIII

It must have been just about a year ago to-day that I received one morning a letter from an old acquaintance of mine, Henry Gregory by name, telling me that he was staying in my neighbourhood—­might he come over to see me?  I asked him to come to luncheon.

I do not remember how I first came to know Gregory, but I was instrumental in once getting him a little legal work to do, since when he has shown a dangerous disposition to require similar services of me, and even to confide in me.  I am quite incapable—­not on principle, but from a sort of feeble courtesy—­of rejecting such overtures.  It does more harm than good, because I am unable to help him in any way; and the result of our talks is only to send him away disappointed and annoyed, and to leave me both bored and compassionate, with that wholly ineffectual compassion which is a mere morbid sentiment.  Judge between him and me!  I will tell the whole story.

Gregory is a man of real ability, conscientious, clear-headed, accurate.  He was one of a large family; his father a country solicitor, I think.  He was at a public school and at the University; he has a small income of his own, perhaps L150 a year; and he drifted to the bar.  I don’t think he ever made friends with anyone in his life—­he is constitutionally incapable of friendship.  I have seen him in the company of one or two unaccountably dreary men, himself the dreariest of the party.  He is long-winded, exact in statement, ponderous.  He has no sort of imagination, and no touch of humour.  He can be depended upon to give you a mass of detailed information on almost any point, and every subject that he touches turns to lead before your eyes.  One has a sense of mental indigestion for a day or two after one has seen him, until one has forgotten his statements.  If I desired to think ill of a writer, I should ask