Oswyn was sober, and Rainham was surprised after a while at his sanity.  He decided that, though one might differ from him, dissent from his premises or his conclusions, he was still a man to be taken seriously.  His fluency was as remarkable as ever, and at first as spleenful; by-and-by his outrageous mood gave way, and, in response to some of Rainham’s adroit thrusts, he condescended to stand on his defence.  He could give a reasonable account of himself; was prepared clearly, and succinctly, and seriously with his justification.  Rainham was impressed anew by his singleness, the purity of his artistic passion.  His life might be disgraceful, indescribable:  his art lay apart from it; and when he took up a brush an enthusiasm, a devotion to art, almost religious, steadied his hand.

“You may think me a charlatan,” he said, with the same savage earnestness, “but I can tell you I am not.  I may fail or I may succeed, as the world counts those things.  It is all the same:  I believe in myself.  It is sufficient to me if I approve myself, and the world may go to damnation!  What I care for is my idea!... yes, my idea, that’s it!  They can howl at me,” he went on; “but they can never say of any stroke of my brush that I put it there for them.  I could have painted pictures like Lightmark if I had cared, you know, but I did not care!”

“And yet he has great facility,” said Rainham tentatively.

“He has more,” said Oswyn bitterly, “or, at least, he had—­genius.  And he has deliberately chosen to go the wrong way, to be conventional.  He can’t plead ‘invincible ignorance’ like the others; he ought to know better.  Well, he has his reward; but I can’t forgive him.”

Rainham shrugged his shoulders with something between a sigh and a laugh.

“Poor boy! he is young, you know.  Perhaps he will live to see the errors of his ways.”

“When he’s an Academician, I suppose?” suggested the other ironically.  “Do they ever see the errors of their ways?  If they do they don’t show it.  No; he will marry a rich wife, and make speeches at banquets, and paint portraits of celebrities, for the rest of his days.  And in fifty years’ time people will say, ’Lightmark, R.A.?  Who the devil was he?’”

By this time the young moon had risen, and its cold light shimmered on the misty river.  Rainham refilled his pipe, and opened the window still more widely.

“By Jove, what a night!” he said.  “What a night for a painter!  I am sure you are longing to be out in it.  I’m afraid there’s nothing to show you in the dock at present; you must come down again when there’s a ship coming in at night.  I feel quite reconciled to the dock on those occasions.  Shall we go for a stroll in the moonlight—­and seek impressions?”

Oswyn’s restless humour welcomed the suggestion, and he was already waiting, his soft felt hat in one ungloved hand, and a heavy, quaintly carved stick in the other.