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anything so long as he was in contact with art and artists:
the only thing was to get right away. To make the step easier
he had quarrelled with all his friends in Paris. He devel-
oped a talent for telling them home truths, which made
them bear with fortitude his declaration that he had done
with that city and was settling in Gerona, a little town in
the north of Spain which had attracted him when he saw it
from the train on his way to Barcelona. He was living there
now alone.
‘I wonder if he’ll ever do any good,’ said Philip.
He was interested in the human side of that struggle
to express something which was so obscure in the man’s
mind that he was become morbid and querulous. Philip
felt vaguely that he was himself in the same case, but with
him it was the conduct of his life as a whole that perplexed
him. That was his means of self-expression, and what he
must do with it was not clear. But he had no time to con-
tinue with this train of thought, for Lawson poured out a
frank recital of his affair with Ruth Chalice. She had left
him for a young student who had just come from England,
and was behaving in a scandalous fashion. Lawson really
thought someone ought to step in and save the young man.
She would ruin him. Philip gathered that Lawson’s chief
grievance was that the rupture had come in the middle of a
portrait he was painting.
‘Women have no real feeling for art,’ he said. ‘They only
pretend they have.’ But he finished philosophically enough:
‘However, I got four portraits out of her, and I’m not sure if
the last I was working on would ever have been a success.’

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