With sudden force it struck Wynne that he should define his ideals, and know precisely at what he aimed. It was good for a man to be certain of those things for which he would be prepared to lay down his life. He set himself the task of writing down what his ideals actually were, and in so doing failed horribly. What he wrote was inconclusive and embryonic. To a reader it would have conveyed little or nothing. There was a hint of some ambition, but nothing more. It showed the target of his hopes in the pupal stage. The grammatical perfection with which he wrote only added melancholy to the failure. “My God!” exclaimed Wynne, “I can’t even write a specification of what I want to do.” VI The play in which Wynne figured as a hot-potato man was not a success, and there followed a period in which he found no work, and very considerable hardship. Then his fortunes turned a trifle, and to reward himself for all he had endured he took new rooms at the top of a house near Tottenham Court Road, and spent all his money buying furniture and queer odds and ends of brass and Oriental china. It was the first time he had indulged in the luxury of agreeable appointments, and it gave him tremendous pleasure. The furniture he bought was true to its period, though time and the worm had bitten deep beneath the blackened surfaces. He bought in the Caledonian Market or little known streets, and took a fierce pride in bartering for his prizes. These he would bring home upon his head, or, if their size defeated his powers, would push them before him on a greengrocer’s barrow. For pieces of _vertu_ he possessed a sure and infallible eye, and a remarkable sense for disposing them to the best advantage. On the mantelpiece of the attic sitting-room he achieved successfully what, years before, he had failed to do in his father’s home. A note of colour from a cracked Kin Lung bowl, a fillip of light from a battered copper kettle, a slanting pile of beautifully-bound books, and the thing was done. There was no struggle after effect, but the effect was there as if by nature—the right things had found their rightful abiding place. He found writing easier in these surroundings. Hitherto his eye had inevitably fallen upon some hideous object or picture, unthinkingly bought and disastrously disposed in relation to its neighbours—then his thoughts would travel away, lose the thread of their reasoning, or become involved in futile speculation upon other folks’ perverted tastes. But here it was different: here there were no disturbing influences, nothing but a pleasant, restful simplicity. Mrs. Mommet, the bed-shaker, who, for a very small wage, gave Wynne an equally small measure of time, did not share his high opinions of himself as a decorator.