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upon which they had been when Philip first knew them.
‘Lawson’s all right,’ he said contemptuously, ‘he’ll go back
to England, become a fashionable portrait painter, earn ten
thousand a year and be an A. R. A. before he’s forty. Por-
traits done by hand for the nobility and gentry!’
Philip, too, looked into the future, and he saw Clutton
in twenty years, bitter, lonely, savage, and unknown; still in
Paris, for the life there had got into his bones, ruling a small
cenacle with a savage tongue, at war with himself and the
world, producing little in his increasing passion for a per-
fection he could not reach; and perhaps sinking at last into
drunkenness. Of late Philip had been captivated by an idea
that since one had only one life it was important to make a
success of it, but he did not count success by the acquiring
of money or the achieving of fame; he did not quite know
yet what he meant by it, perhaps variety of experience and
the making the most of his abilities. It was plain anyway
that the life which Clutton seemed destined to was failure.
Its only justification would be the painting of imperishable
masterpieces. He recollected Cronshaw’s whimsical meta-
phor of the Persian carpet; he had thought of it often; but
Cronshaw with his faun-like humour had refused to make
his meaning clear: he repeated that it had none unless one
discovered it for oneself. It was this desire to make a suc-
cess of life which was at the bottom of Philip’s uncertainty
about continuing his artistic career. But Clutton began to
talk again.
‘D’you remember my telling you about that chap I met in
Brittany? I saw him the other day here. He’s just off to Ta-

Of Human Bondage