with etchings and pictures in those curiously-low tones for which he had so unreasonable an affection—­was what he cherished most in London.  He read little now, but the mere presence of the books he loved best in rough, uneven cases, painted black, lining the walls, caressed him.  As with persons one has loved and grown used to loving, it was not always needful that they should speak to him; it was sufficient, simply, that they should be there.  Neither did he write on these long, interminable evenings, which were prolonged sometimes far into the night.  He had ended by being able to smile at his literary ambitions of twenty, cultivating his indolence as something choice and original, finding his destiny appropriate.

He spent the time in interminable reveries, sitting with a volume before him, as often as not unopened, smoking incessantly, and looking out of the window.  The habit amused himself at times; it was so eminently symbolic of his destiny.  Life, after all, had been to him nothing so much as that—­a long looking out of window, the impartial spectatorship of a crowd of persons and passions from which he had come at last to seem strangely detached, almost as much as from this chameleon river, which he had observed with such satisfaction in all its manifold gradations of character and colour; its curious cold grayness in the beginning of an autumnal dawn; the illusion of warmth and depth which it sustained at noon, bringing up its burden of leviathans on the top of the flood; its sheen on moonless nights, when only little punctures, green and red and orange, and its audible stillness, reminded him that down in the obscurity the great polluted stream stole on wearily, monotonously, everlastingly to the sea.  It was changeful and changeless.  He thought he knew its effects by heart, but it had always new ones in reserve to surprise and delight him.  He declared it at last to be inexhaustible.  It was like a diamond on sunny days, flashing out light in every little ripple; in the late, sunless afternoon the light lay deeply within it, and it seemed jealous of giving back the least particle.  He compared it then to an opal or a sapphire, which shine with the same parsimonious radiance.

One night, while he sat smoking in his wonted meditative fashion, he had a visitor—­the painter Oswyn.  He had almost forgotten his invitation, but he reminded himself of his first impression, and greeted him with a cordiality which the other seemed to find surprising.  He took him into his sanctuary and found him whisky and a pipe; then he set himself to make the painter talk, a task which he found by no means arduous.