The gaunt youth went to Burne-Jones with the light of a new life in his eyes; he had shaken off the bitter melancholy which had blackened his past two years and had kept his eyes incessantly on the grave; and, turning his back on the two years blank of fulfilment or artistic endeavour, he entered the gates of Burne-Jones’s house in the long North End Road in West Kensington with new hopes built upon the promise of renewed health. We can guess roughly what was in the portfolio that he took to show Burne-Jones--we have seen what he had gathered together in the _Scrap Book_ as his best work up to mid-1890, and he had done little to add to it by mid-1891. We know the poverty of his artistic skill from the wretched pen-and-ink portrait he made of himself at this time--a sorry thing which he strained every resource to recover from Robert Ross who maliciously hid it from him and eventually gave it to the British Museum--an act which, had Beardsley known the betrayal that was to be, would have made him turn in his grave. But that was not as yet. We know from a fellow-clerk in the city that Beardsley had made an occasional drawing in wash, or toned in pencil, like the remarkably promising _Molière_, which it is difficult to believe as having been made previous to the visit to Burne-Jones, were it not that it holds no hint of Burne-Jones’s influence which was now to dominate Beardsley’s style for a while. Burne-Jones took a great liking to the youth, was charmed with his quick intelligence and enthusiasm, tickled by his ironies, and took him to his heart. When Beardsley left the hospitable man he left in high spirits, and an ardent disciple. Burne-Jonesesques were henceforth to pour forth from his hands for a couple of years. Beardsley’s call on Watts was not so happy--the solemnities reigned, and the great man shrewdly suspected that Beardsley was not concerned with serious fresco--’tis even whispered that he suspected naughtiness.