The evening was too beautiful, and too full of the sense of fate, for sleep to be possible, and long after George had finally said “All the same, I think I’ll turn in,” his father sat on, listening to the 40gradual subsidence of the traffic, and watching the night widen above Paris.

 

As he sat there, discouragement overcame him. His last plan, his plan for getting George finally and completely over to his side, was going to fail as all his other plans had failed. If there were war there would be no more portraits to paint, and his vision of wealth would vanish as visions of love and happiness and comradeship had one by one faded away. Nothing had ever succeeded with him but the thing he had in some moods set least store by, the dogged achievement of his brush; and just as that was about to assure his happiness, here was this horrible world-catastrophe threatening to fall across his path.

 

His misfortune had been that he could neither get on easily with people nor live without them; could never wholly isolate¹ himself in his art, nor yet resign himself to any permanent human communion that left it out, or, worse still, dragged it in irrelevantly². He had tried both kinds, and on the whole preferred the first. His marriage, his stupid ill-fated marriage, had after all not been the most disenchanting of his adventures, because Julia Ambrose, when she married him, had made no pretense³ of espousing⁴ his art.

 

He had seen her first in the tumble-down Venetian palace where she lived with her bachelor uncle, old Horace Ambrose, who dabbled⁵ in bric-a-brac and cultivated a guileless Bohemianism. Campton, looking 41back, could still understand why, to a youth fresh from Utica, at odds⁶ with his father, unwilling⁷ to go into the family business, and strangling with violent unexpressed ideas on art and the universe, marriage with Julia Ambrose had seemed so perfect a solution. She had been brought up abroad by her parents, a drifting and

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