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example of Clutton. But Fanny Price hated him to take sug-
gestions from anyone but herself, and when he asked her
help after someone else had been talking to him she would
refuse with brutal rudeness. The other fellows, Lawson,
Clutton, Flanagan, chaffed him about her.
‘You be careful, my lad,’ they said, ‘she’s in love with
you.’
‘Oh, what nonsense,’ he laughed.
The thought that Miss Price could be in love with anyone
was preposterous. It made him shudder when he thought of
her uncomeliness, the bedraggled hair and the dirty hands,
the brown dress she always wore, stained and ragged at the
hem: he supposed she was hard up, they were all hard up,
but she might at least be clean; and it was surely possible
with a needle and thread to make her skirt tidy.
Philip began to sort his impressions of the people he
was thrown in contact with. He was not so ingenuous as
in those days which now seemed so long ago at Heidelberg,
and, beginning to take a more deliberate interest in human-
ity, he was inclined to examine and to criticise. He found it
difficult to know Clutton any better after seeing him every
day for three months than on the first day of their acquain-
tance. The general impression at the studio was that he was
able; it was supposed that he would do great things, and
he shared the general opinion; but what exactly he was go-
ing to do neither he nor anybody else quite knew. He had
worked at several studios before Amitrano’s, at Julian’s, the
Beaux Arts, and MacPherson’s, and was remaining longer at
Amitrano’s than anywhere because he found himself more

Of Human Bondage