The moral taint, mind, was all hypothetical. Charles Potts had not heard one syllable of Margaret Dacre's history, had been told nothing about it, knew nothing of her except that he and Geoffrey had saved her from starvation in the streets. But when people go in for the public profession of virtue, it is astonishing to find how quickly they listen to reports of the shortcomings and backslidings of those who are not professedly in the same category. It seemed a bit of fatalism too, that this acquaintance should have occurred immediately on Geoffrey's selling his picture for a large sum to Mr. Stompff. Had he not done this, there is no doubt that the other thing would have been heard of by few, noticed by none; but in art, as in literature, and indeed in most other professions, no crime is so heavily visited as that of being successful. It is the sale of your picture, or the success of your novel, that first makes people find out how you steal from other people, how your characters are mere reproductions of your own personal friends,--for which you ought to be shunned,--how laboured is your pathos, and how poor your jokes. It is the repetition of your success that induces the criticism; not merely that you are a singular instance of the badness of the public taste, but that you have a red nose, a decided cast in one eye, and that undoubtedly your grandmother had hard labour for stealing a clock. Geoff Ludlow the struggling might have done as he liked without comment; on Geoff Ludlow the possessor of unlimited commissions from the great Stompff it was meet that every vial of virtuous wrath should be poured.