FullReads

“If I could have painted that face, with that question on it, I should have done a great thing. The next greatest thing was to see that I couldn’t–and that grace was given me. But, oh, at that minute, Rickham, was there anything on earth I wouldn’t have given to have Stroud alive before me, and to hear him say: ‘It’s not too late–I’ll show you how’?

“It WAS too late–it would have been, even if he’d been alive. I packed up my traps, and went down and told Mrs. Stroud. Of course I didn’t tell her THAT–it would have been Greek to her. I simply said I couldn’t paint him, that I was too moved. She rather liked the idea–she’s so romantic! It was that that made her give me the donkey. But she was terribly upset at not getting the portrait–she did so want him ‘done’ by some one showy! At first I was afraid she wouldn’t let me off–and at my wits’ end I suggested Grindle. Yes, it was I who started Grindle: I told Mrs. Stroud he was the ‘coming’ man, and she told somebody else, and so it got to be true. . . . And he painted Stroud without wincing; and she hung the picture among her husband’s things. . . .”

He flung himself down in the arm-chair near mine, laid back his head, and clasping his arms beneath it, looked up at the picture above the chimney-piece.

“I like to fancy that Stroud himself would have given it to me, if he’d been able to say what he thought that day.”

And, in answer to a question I put half-mechanically–“Begin again?” he flashed out. “When the one thing that brings me anywhere near him is that I knew enough to leave off?”

He stood up and laid his hand on my shoulder with a laugh. “Only the irony of it is that I AM still painting–since Grindle’s doing it for me! The Strouds stand alone, and happen once–but there’s no exterminating our kind of art.”