* * * * * Hitherto George had been quite alone in his blind instinctive struggle—the fight against the effort to force him into a mould, the eager searching out for life and more life which would respond to the spark of life within. Now, he began to find unexpected allies, discovered at first almost with suspicion, then with immense happiness, that he was not quite alone, that there were others who valued what he valued. He discovered men’s friendship and the touch of girls’ lips and hands. First came Mr. Barnaby Slush, at that time a “most famous novelist,” who had hit the morbid-cretinish British taste with a sensational, crude-Christian moral novel which sold millions of copies in a year and is now forgotten, except that it probably lies embalmed somewhere in the Tauchnitz collection, that mausoleum of unreadable works. Mr. Slush was a bit of a boozer and highly delighted with his notoriety. Still, he did occasionally look around him; he was not wholly blinkered with prejudice and unheeding blankness like most of the middle-class inhabitants of Martin’s Point. He noticed George, laughed at some of the pert but pretty acute schoolboyish remarks George made and for which he was invariably squelched, was “interested” in his passion for painting and the persistence he gave to it. “There’s something in that boy of yours, Mrs. Winterbourne. He’s got a mind. He’ll do something in the world.” “Oh, do you think so, Mr. Slush,”—Isabel, half-flattered, half-bristling with horror and rage at the thought that George might “have a mind”—“he’s just a healthy, happy schoolboy, and only thinks of pleasing his Mummie.” “Umph,” said Mr. Slush. “Well, I’d like to do something for him. There’s more in him than you think. _I_ believe there’s an artist in him.” “If I thought that,” exclaimed Isabel viciously, “I’d flog him till all such nonsense was flogged out of him.”