Miss Share, as she was addressed in the office, was the only child of an art-master, and until she found the West End she had lived all her life in a long Putney "road," no house of which could truthfully say that it was in any way better than or different from its neighbours. This street realized the ideal of equality before God. It had been Lilian's prison, from which she was let out for regular daily exercise, and she hated it as ardently² as any captive ever hated a prison. Lionel Share had had charge over the art side of an enormous polytechnic³ in another suburb. In youth he had won a national scholarship at South Kensington, and the glory of the scholarship never faded--not even when he was elected President of the Association of Art Masters. He was destined⁴ by fate to be a teacher of art, and appointed by heaven to be a headmaster and to reach the highest height of artistic⁵ pedagogy. He understood organization; the handling of committees, of under-masters and of pupils; the filling-up of forms; the engaging of models; and he understood profoundly the craft of pushing pupils successfully through examinations. His name was a sweet odour in the nostrils⁶ of the London County Council. He rehabilitated⁷ art and artists in Putney, which admitted that it had had quite a wrong notion of art and artists, having hitherto regarded art as unmanly, and artists as queer, loose, bankruptcy-bound fellows; whereas Mr. Share paid his rent promptly⁸, went to Margate for his long holiday, wore a frock-coat, attended church, and had been mentioned as a suitable candidate for the Putney Borough⁹ Council. Until Mr. Share Putney had never been able to explain to itself the respectability of the National Gallery, which after all was full of art done by artists. The phenomenon of Mr. Share solved the enigma--the Old Masters must have been like Lionel Share.

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