In London I was an absolute stranger.  We had no town house.  On the few occasions when the family had gone to London, it was to stay in Belgrave Square with my Aunt Prue, who was an unmarried sister of my mother’s.

‘Since the death of the Prince Consort, to go no further back,’ she used to say, ’a dreadful change has come over the tone of society; the love of bohemianism, the desire to take up any kind of people, if they are amusing, and still more if they are rich, is levelling everything.  However, I’m nobody now; I say nothing.’

What wonder that from my very childhood my aunt took a prejudice against me, and predicted for me a career ’as deplorable as Cyril Aylwin’s,’ and sympathised with my mother in her terror of the Gypsy strain in my father’s branch of the family?

Her tastes and instincts being intensely aristocratic, she suffered a martyrdom from her ever present consciousness of this disgrace.  She had seen very much more of what is called Society than my mother had ever an opportunity of seeing.  It was not, however, aristocracy, but Royalty that won the true worship of her soul.

Although she was immeasurably inferior to my mother in everything, her influence over her was great, and it was always for ill.  I believe that even my mother’s prejudice against Tom Wynne was largely owing to my aunt, who disliked my relations towards Wynne simply because he did not represent one of the great Wynne families.  But the remarkable thing was that, although my mother thus yielded to my aunt’s influence, she in her heart despised her sister’s ignorance and her narrowness of mind.  She often took a humorous pleasure in seeing my aunt’s aristocratic proclivities baffled by some vexing contretemps or by some slight passed upon her by people of superior rank, especially by those in the Royal circle.

There have been so many descriptions of art schools, from the famous ‘Gandish’s’ down to the very moment at which I write, that I do not intend to describe mine.

It would be very far from my taste to use a narrative like this, a narrative made sacred by the spiritual love it records, as a means of advertising efforts of such modest pretensions as mine when placed in comparison with the work of the illustrious painters my friendship with whom has been the great honour of my life.  And if I allude here to the fact of my being a painter, it is in order that I may not be mistaken for another Aylwin. my cousin Percy, who in some unpublished poems of his which I have seen has told how a sailor was turned into a poet by love—­love of Rhona Boswell.  In the same way, these pages are written to tell how I was made a painter by love of her whom I first saw in Raxton churchyard, her who filled my being as Beatrice filled the being of Dante when ’the spirit of life, which hath its dwelling in the secretest chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently that the least pulses of his body shook therewith.’