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Philip went into the garden to smoke his pipe. He sat on a
bench, and suddenly began to laugh hysterically.
A few days later his uncle expressed the hope that he
would spend the next few weeks at Blackstable.
‘Yes, that will suit me very well,’ said Philip.
‘I suppose it’ll do if you go back to Paris in September.’
Philip did not reply. He had thought much of what Foi-
net said to him, but he was still so undecided that he did
not wish to speak of the future. There would be something
fine in giving up art because he was convinced that he could
not excel; but unfortunately it would seem so only to him-
self: to others it would be an admission of defeat, and he did
not want to confess that he was beaten. He was an obstinate
fellow, and the suspicion that his talent did not lie in one di-
rection made him inclined to force circumstances and aim
notwithstanding precisely in that direction. He could not
bear that his friends should laugh at him. This might have
prevented him from ever taking the definite step of aban-
doning the study of painting, but the different environment
made him on a sudden see things differently. Like many an-
other he discovered that crossing the Channel makes things
which had seemed important singularly futile. The life
which had been so charming that he could not bear to leave
it now seemed inept; he was seized with a distaste for the
cafes, the restaurants with their ill-cooked food, the shabby
way in which they all lived. He did not care any more what
his friends thought about him: Cronshaw with his rhetoric,
Mrs. Otter with her respectability, Ruth Chalice with her af-
fectations, Lawson and Clutton with their quarrels; he felt a

10 Of Human Bondage