During the journey back to England I thought much of Strickland. I tried to set in order what I had to tell his wife. It was unsatisfactory, and I could not imagine that she would be content with me; I was not content with myself. Strickland perplexed¹ me. I could not understand his motives². When I had asked him what first gave him the idea of being a painter, he was unable or unwilling³ to tell me. I could make nothing of it. I tried to persuade myself than an obscure feeling of revolt had been gradually coming to a head in his slow mind, but to challenge this was the undoubted fact that he had never shown any impatience⁴ with the monotony of his life. If, seized by an intolerable boredom⁵, he had determined⁶ to be a painter merely to break with irksome ties, it would have been comprehensible, and commonplace; but commonplace is precisely⁷ what I felt he was not. At last, because I was romantic, I devised an explanation which I acknowledged to be far-fetched, but which was the only one that in any way satisfied me. It was this: I asked myself whether there was not in his soul some deep-rooted instinct of creation, which the circumstances of his life had obscured, but which grew relentlessly⁸, as a cancer may grow in the living tissues, till at last it took possession of his whole being and forced him irresistibly⁹ to action. The cuckoo lays its egg in the strange bird's nest, and when the young one is hatched it shoulders its foster-brothers out and breaks at last the nest that has sheltered it.