Are there two religions? A few more years shall roll, in ten years half of you boys will be dead. Smut, nose dropping off, fornication and all other deadly sins. Oh, wash me in Thy Precious Blood, and take my sins away. Blood, Smut. And then the other—a draught of vintage that has been cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth, tasting of Flora and the country green, dance and Provençal song, and sun-burned mirth? Listening to the sound of the wind as you fell asleep; watching the blue butterflies and the Small Coppers hovering and settling on the great scented lavender bush; taking off your clothes and letting your body slide into a cool deep clear rock-pool, while the grey kittiwakes clamoured round the sun-white cliffs and the scent of sea-weeds and salt water filled you; watching the sun go down and trying to write something of what it made you feel, like Keats; getting up very early in the morning and riding out along the white empty lanes on your bicycle; wanting to be alone and think about things and feeling strange and happy and ecstatic—was that another religion? Or was that all Smut and Sin? Best not speak of it, best keep it all hidden. I can’t help it, if it is Smut and Sin. Is “Romeo and Juliet” smut? It’s in the same book where you do parsing and analysis out of “King John.” Seize on the white wonder of dear Juliet’s hand and steal immortal blessing from her lips.... * * * * * But more than words about things were things themselves. You looked and looked at them, and then you wanted to put down what they looked like, re-arrange them in patterns. In the drawing class they made you look at a dirty whitish cube, cylinder and cone, and you drew and re-drew hard outlines which weren’t there. But for yourself you wanted to get the colours of things and how they faded into each other and how they formed themselves—or did you form them?—into exciting patterns. It was so much more fun to paint things than even to read what Keats and Shakespeare thought about them. George spent all his pocket-money on paints and drawing pencils and sketch-books and oil sketching paper and water-colour blocks. For a long time he hadn’t much to look at, even in reproductions. He had Cruikshank and Quiz illustrations, which he didn’t much care for; and a reproduction of a Bougereau which he hated, and two Rossetti pictures which he rather liked, and a catalogue of the Tate Collection which gave him photographs of a great many horrible Watts and Frank Dicksees. Best of all, he liked an album of coloured reproductions of Turner’s water-colours. Then, one spring, George Augustus took him to Paris for a few days. They did an “educative” visit to the Louvre, and George simply leaped at the Italians and became very pre-Raphaelite and adored the Primitives. He was quite feverish for weeks after he got back, unable to talk of anything else. Isabel was worried about him—it was so _unboyish_, so, well, really,