My love of animals led me to linger in the garden.  When I returned to the house I found D’Arcy in the green dining-room, where we talked, and he read aloud some verses to me.  We then went to the studio.  He said,

’No doubt you are surprised at my menagerie.  Every man has one side of his character where the child remains.  I have a love of animals which, I suppose, I may call a passion.  The kind of amusement they can afford me is like none other.  It is the self-consciousness of men and women that makes them, in a general way, intensely unamusing.  I turn from them to the unconscious brutes, and often get a world of enjoyment.  To watch a kitten or a puppy play, or the funny antics of a parrot or a cockatoo, or the wise movements of a wombat, will keep me for hours from being bored.’

‘And children,’ I said—­’do you like children?’

’Yes, so long as they remain like the young animals—­until they become self-conscious, I mean, and that is very soon.  Then their charm goes.  Has it ever occurred to you how fascinating a beautiful young girl would be if she were as unconscious as a young animal?  What makes you sigh?’

My thoughts had flown to Winifred breakfasting with her ’Prince of the Mist’ on Snowdon.  And I said to myself, ’How he would have been fascinated by a sight like that!’

My experience of men at that time was so slight that the opinion I then formed of D’Arcy as a talker was not of much account.  But since then I have seen very much of men, and I find that I was right in the view I then took of his conversational powers.  When his spirits were at their highest he was without an equal as a wit, without an equal as a humourist.  He had more than even Cyril Aylwin’s quickness of repartee, and it was of an incomparably rarer quality.  To define it would be, of course, impossible, but I might perhaps call it poetic fancy suddenly stimulated at moments by animal spirits into rapid movements—­so rapid, indeed, that what in slower movement would be merely fancy, in him became wit.  Beneath the coruscations of this wit a rare and deep intellect was always perceptible.

His humour was also so fanciful that it seemed poetry at play, but here was the remarkable thing:  although he was not unconscious of his other gifts, he did not seem to be in the least aware that he was a humourist of the first order; every jeu d’esprit seemed to leap from him involuntarily, like the spray from a fountain.  A dull man like myself must not attempt to reproduce these qualities here.

While he was talking he kept on painting, and I said to him, ’I can’t understand how you can keep up a conversation while you are at work.’

I took care not to tell him that I was an amateur painter.

’It is only when the work that I am on is in some degree mechanical that I can talk while at work.  These flowers, which were brought to me this morning for my use in painting this picture, will very soon wither, and I can put them into the picture without being disturbed by talk; but if I were at work upon this face, if I were putting dramatic expression into these eyes, I should have to be silent.’