He was soon taken beyond the Polytechnic, for Mr. Sivwright led him to the National Gallery and showed him the treasures there. The boy was at once prostrate before Greuze. Ah! there were softness, tenderness, charm: all that he had lacked and longed for. It was in vain that Mr. Sivwright took him to the Van Eycks and the Teniers and the Franz Hals, striking an attitude and saying: "Fine! Dramatic! That's the real stuff!" The boy would return to his Greuze and pour out on the pretty maidens all the longings for emotion with which he was filled, and the yearning seemed to him to be the irresistible torrent of art which carried those who felt it to the pinnacles of fame. . . . Yet he knew that Mr. Sivwright was a shoddy failure of a man, and he knew that Mr. Sivwright's ecstasies were forced and had small connection with the pictures before him. He also knew that he had not the least desire to paint like Greuze, but he could not resist the fascination of the pretty maidens and the gush of feeling he had in front of them. The Italians he did not understand and Velasquez and El Greco repelled him. Also, the pictures as a whole excited him so that they ran into each other and he could not extricate them, and Greuze became his stand-by. He felt safe with Greuze. Every day he used to go home and tell his mother of the day's doings, from the moment when he mounted the bus in the morning to the time when he walked home in the evening. He gave her minute accounts of all the people in the class, of the cheap restaurant where he had lunch, of the marvels of the streets: the old women selling flowers at Oxford Circus; the gorgeous shop-windows; the illuminated signs and advertisements, green, red, and yellow; the theatres; the posters of the comic men outside the music-halls; the rich people in their motor-cars; the marvellous ladies in their silks and their furs; the poor men selling matches; the scarlet soldiers and blue sailors; the big policemen who stopped the traffic with their white hands; the awful, endless desolation of Portland Place, with trees--actually trees--at the end of it; the whirl, the glitter, the roar, the splendour of London. And he used to mimic for her the strange people he saw, the mincing ladies and the lordly shopwalkers, the tittering girls and the men working in the streets. The more excited he was the more depressed was Golda. What was it all for? Why could not people live a decent quiet life? Why was all this whirligig revolving round the prison? . . . But she smiled and laughed and applauded him, and believed him when he said none of the Christians could draw as well as he. He began to win prizes. It became his whole object to beat the Christians. What they told him to paint he would paint better than any of them. And by sheer will and concentration he succeeded. Mr. Sivwright said there was no holding him, and very soon declared he had nothing more to learn.